Co-production will be key to the success of a new government data tool
The Government’s new Office for Local Government (Oflog) was formally launched at the LGA’s annual conference by Secretary of State Michael Gove MP.
It is intended to provide ‘authoritative and accessible data and analysis about the performance of local government and support its improvement’.
Oflog is an office of the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (DLUHC), with a stated ambition of starting small and being developed iteratively, and eventually becoming independent.
To start, Oflog has brought together some existing data into its newly created ‘Local Authority Data Explorer’, alongside a policy paper setting out the context, rationale and approach to setting up the organisation, including its scope and future functions.
With other senior LGA colleagues, I have been lobbying on behalf of local government since Oflog was first announced in the Levelling Up White Paper last year.
Local Government Minister Lee Rowley MP attended an LGA councillors’ forum earlier this year to talk about the organisation, and we have met separately; LGA officers and I meet regularly with DLUHC officials; and I have provided further feedback as a member of the Oflog political leaders’ group, meeting regularly with the minister.
I have also met Lord Amyas Morse (pictured), the interim Chair of Oflog, and interim Chief Executive Josh Goodman, to pass on our views.
Given local government already has a very strong record of data transparency, supported by LG Inform, the LGA’s freely available, award-winning data platform, I questioned the need for the Local Authority Data Explorer.
I also underlined the importance of co-production with the sector in future iterations of the dashboard, to make it more meaningful locally; and the need for clarity around how this platform fits together with other dashboards proposed by the Department for Education and work on indicators being undertaken by the Department of Health and Social Care.
The Government needs to deepen its engagement with councils to identify and define future sets of metrics.
Importantly, the dashboard should include a wider set of metrics, not just about council performance, but about the activity and spend of the rest of the public sector, including central government, that is happening in each local authority area.
This will help councillors with their place-shaping role, working with those public sector partners.
Looking carefully at the data, we have some questions and observations about some of the metrics officials have chosen, which we will be raising directly with government.
Given Oflog remains an ongoing project, we will continue to work to ensure the sector’s voice informs the next stages of development and future iterations of the tool.
Some commentators have suggested the Oflog dashboard is ‘dreary and uninviting’, and therefore colleagues at the LGA have created a new report in LG Inform that contains all the metrics, which I hope you find more visually appealing.
You can choose your authority at the top of the report, and change your comparison group; and the reports contain wider contextual information.
If you have views on which metrics and themes the Local Authority Data Explorer might contain in future, to better support your service area or local authority, please let me know.
I can feed this back to officials, to ensure the dashboard develops in a way that is useful to councils in the future.
- Find out more about LG Inform.