Measuring Local Government

If you attempt to get a list of all services that a local authority is legally required to provide, you’ll find yourself at a bit of a loss. I cannot seem to find a maintained list (or any definitive list for that matter) of services that should be provided. When searching the internet, you’ll often see the phrase “...services they provide include...” followed by a series of what sound like departments. Think terms like education, social care, waste collection, etc. What I can’t figure out is how does a local authority measure its effectiveness or even that it has met its statutory obligations if such a list doesn’t exist. Perhaps the list does exit and it’s just top secret? I mean I can’t find it on the handful of local authority websites near where I live: Dundee, Fife, Angus, and Perth & Kinross. There are lists of services but reading through them you can see that they really only focus on services where there is an interaction between constituents and the local authority. And fair play to them, that makes sense for servicing a constituency, but for measuring delivery it’s a bit frustrating.

This task would be a full-time job for someone and require a substantial amount of time.

You might then further realize that the requirements put on the various types of local authority (England has five types: county councils, district councils, unitary authorities, metropolitan districts and London boroughs) and those are then separate from Northern Ireland and Scotland (I’m not sure where Wales lives in this incestuous family). I’m personally most interested in Scotland as that is where I live, but it’s exhausting to pick out the differences and nuances. It appears that the various factions of local authorities have collective associations, in England that is the Local Government Association (LGA), Northern Ireland has the Northern Ireland Local Government Association (NILGA), then Wales has the Welsh Local Government Association (WLGA) and Scotland has the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities (COSLA). These would all be good places to look and see if they have collated a list of all services that a local council under their purview are legally obligated to administer. But if they have a list much like the local authorities themselves, they keep it in a not easily found place. Although the LGA had a nice page listing guides to specific legislation and what that means for its organizational partners. https://www.local.gov.uk/parliament/legislation-guides

So, if local authorities don’t keep a public list, and if the overarching organizations of local authorities don’t keep a public list, then I guess I would need to go back to the legislation itself which would have determined each of the services that local authorities need to deliver. https://www.legislation.gov.uk/

This task would be a full-time job for someone and require a substantial amount of time. Just as a weird thought the legislation website itself is a mess of legislation that through time will supersede parts of older legislation. But it is all linked, through textual amendments and repeals. It is almost a graph of how legislation has developed in the UK since 1274 (so says the website). It would be neat to build an application that can give you an up-to-date list of all legislation that applies to a particular situation given a particular time, geography, and aspect. Say, what are the rules concerning operating a boat on a canal in Scotland this week? Wouldn’t that be fun? I probably don’t know enough about legislation and how it applies to be the one to build this, but it would be fun.

But back to the matter at hand, such a tool would allow you to work out the statutory obligation’s councils have to their constituents. Having this list would allow an enterprising individual to work out measurements for each of those statutory obligations and then to measure them. You can find out if your local authority is delivering everything it should. Perhaps you could even measure the effectiveness of local authorities against each other. It wouldn’t be a direct comparison per se as each local authority has differing populations, demography, geographic location, rural versus urban compositions, and a host of other factors. But wouldn’t that be an interesting read.