Mind the Gap: Frontiers of Performance in Local Government V

A focus on ‘place-shaping’ lies at the heart of the modern vision for local public services. It looks beyond silo delivery of public services, to the broader impact of services and the spending of tax payers’ money. This is reflected in the Comprehensive Area Assessment (CAA), which provides a framework where, for the first time, local public services are collectively held to account for delivering improved outcomes for local people.

What people think of the services they receive is crucial for understanding how well local authorities and their partners are performing. The Place Surveys, conducted across all English local authority areas, give us this information, and the CAA’s focus on such public perceptions data is important, as it encourages services to concentrate on what actually matters to local people, rather than counting outputs. However, as we have outlined before, there are ‘perils’ in perception measures when assessing performance – in particular, perceptions are often determined to a large degree by the nature of the population a local authority serves, as much as the local authority itself.

This latest report attempts to take this into account, by looking at the extent to which perception ratings in different local areas are higher or lower than we would expect given local circumstances (and in turn providing a ‘gap’ score which shows whether perceptions are more or less positive than we would expect given local circumstances). In the simplest terms, our aim is to level the playing field when considering scores on perception measures, while highlighting which councils do best and worst given their local circumstances.

We include here, for the first time, the full version of our new Area Challenge Index, which provides a single score indicating how ‘easy’ or ‘difficult’ a job an individual local authority area will face in achieving positive perception ratings from residents.