The Local Government Benchmarking Framework (LGBF) brings together a wide range of information about how all Scottish councils perform in delivering services to local communities.

 

It is a high-level benchmarking tool designed to help senior management teams and elected members ask questions about key council services.

 

The LGBF reflects a commitment by SOLACE (Scotland) and COSLA to develop better measurement and comparable data in order to help councils improve services, target resources to areas of greatest impact and enhance public accountability.

 

Since 2010-11, all Scottish local authorities have worked together to report standard information on the services they provide. This information takes the form of indicators that measure aspects of performance (for example, how much a service costs per user or how satisfied local people are with a service) across all areas of local government activity.

 

The LGBF provides high-level information designed to encourage councils to examine why variations in cost and performance are occurring between similar councils. The framework itself does not supply the answers. That happens as councils engage with each other to ‘drill down’ and explore why these variations are happening (see information on ‘family groups’ below).

 

Publication of the LGBF forms part of each council’s statutory public performance reporting.

 

The Local Government Benchmarking Framework website contains all the LGBF data for the most recent reporting year, information on key findings and national trends and good practice from councils.

 

LGBF Family groups

To understand why variations in cost and performance are occurring, councils work together to ‘drill-down’ into the benchmarking data across service areas. This process has been organised around ‘family groups’ of councils so that we are comparing councils that are similar in terms of the type of population that they serve (e.g. relative deprivation and affluence) and the type of area in they cover (e.g. urban, semi-rural, rural). The point of comparing like with like is that this is more likely to lead to useful learning and improvement.

 

Information on the family groups is available on the LGBF website.