Scottish local authorities ‘are becoming more efficient’

Scottish councils have continued to make “substantial improvements” in efficiency and productivity over the past year, according to a new report.

The Local Government Benchmarking Framework report spans areas such as education, housing and leisure services.

According to the report, the total number of pre-school places provided by councils has risen by 11.8 per cent across Scotland since 2010, providing an additional 10,821 places. This has been achieved against a backdrop of a 5.4 per cent reduction in gross expenditure.

Our ambition in undertaking this important work is to continue to improve the lives of citizens throughout Scotland’s many diverse communities

Culture and leisure services have also seen costs per visit reduce, while significant increases in visitor numbers for sports (17.3 per cent), libraries (26.6 per cent) and museums (25.8 per cent) have been achieved against a backdrop of reductions in gross expenditure.

Benchmarking brings together a wide range of information about how Scottish councils perform in delivering services to local communities, and the framework was set up in collaboration with Improvement Service (IS), the Society of Local Authority Chief Executives (SOLACE) and the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities (COSLA).

COSLA president David O’Neill and chairwoman of SOLACE Scotland Angela Leitch said: “Our ambition in undertaking this important work is to continue to improve the lives of citizens throughout Scotland’s many diverse communities.

“Good public services can help contribute significantly to helping people to have better opportunities in life, and better quality of life. The cumulative impact of the whole public sector can add further value.

“To that effect we also encourage other public service partners to share in and learn from our work to date. We will work with colleagues across the wider public service in the years ahead to broaden the range of indicators being deployed to support benchmarking.

“To achieve our ambition will require a collective public service effort but we think that effort will be more than rewarded by further improvements in services to local people across Scotland.”

Benchmarking uses specific indicators to measure how organisations are performing, for example, how much a service costs per user. These provide a simple metric which can then be compared across organisations and year-on-year.

Over the past four years all 32 councils have been working with the Improvement Service (IS) to develop a common approach to benchmarking. The core purpose of this work is to support all councils to improve their services by working and learning together.

Looking at council management of housing stock, the report said rent due lost to voids has remained unchanged at 1.3 per cent since 2010/11. It added that this suggests councils continue to manage their stock well in the face of mounting pressures as a consequence of the impacts of welfare reform among other factors. In the last 12 months the Scotland average for the percentage of unemployed people assisted into work from council funded/operated employability programmes rose from 9.6 to 12.6 per cent of total unemployed. There is a considerable range across councils, from 2.3 to 34.8 per cent, and work is prioritised in the year ahead to improve the robustness of this measure and provide reliable data on the progression of these people into employment.

The report concludes: “There is a continuous improvement programme to refine the benchmarking framework and this year there will be a strong focus on improving the outcome benchmarks for pre-school and school provision in Scotland.

“We presently lack a consistent measure of children’s development at entry to primary school, and our measures of attainment at secondary level are academically focused and take no account of vocational attainment or the wider achievements of pupils.”