Getting information about your council and others is made easier by the LGA’s award-winning data benchmarking tool
In your role as a new councillor, you will want to know more about the local authority for which you are now a member. LG Inform is the LGA’s award-winning data benchmarking tool, funded by the UK government, and it can help you with this.
It brings together more than 11,000 performance, financial, demographic and contextual data items about your council and area, and, importantly, keeps them up to date.
This data would otherwise be scattered across the websites of multiple government departments and other organisations.
Additionally, LG Inform presents the data in user-friendly charts and graphs, rather than spreadsheets.
The tool makes it easy for you to compare data about your local authority with that of other similar councils, identifies which councils perform the best (so you might learn from them), and helps you understand what is happening in your area over time.
Plus, it is an open tool, so residents can use it too.
The LGA regularly produces themed LG Inform reports, enabling you to focus on a variety of topics in more depth. There are currently more than 50 of these, on subjects such as planning, special educational needs and disabilities, children’s services, homelessness, and waste.
Quality data is invaluable in helping you to understand local as well as national trends and issues. LG Inform provides you with this, so will support you in holding informed discussions with officers and other members, and help you with decision-making.
For more granular data about your council area, LG Inform Plus is a subscription-based service that can provide a selection of ward data and reports for free, including a range of information about your residents.
If your authority has subscribed to this service, you can access it by registering or signing in with your local authority email address.
Finally, there are free online training webinars to help you understand and get the most out of LG Inform and LG Inform Plus.