LGA requests ‘urgent’ Gove meeting over Oflog’s role and data limitations

The role of the Office for Local Government (Oflog) has once again been called into question, this time in a Local Government Association (LGA) response to a recent national media article.

LGA chair Shaun Davies has written to Michael Gove, secretary of state for the Department for Levelling Up, Communities and Local Government, over the use of Oflog data in the article on council performance in The Timesand Oflog’s “lack of action” to “correct inaccuracies and misleading content”.

Davies has requested an “urgent meeting” to discuss the LGA’s concerns. He said the LGA’s previous “warnings about the use of data and Oflog’s ability to advise and brief the media about what the data does and doesn’t show have now come to pass”.

The LGA highlighted several problems with the article’s use of Oflog data, which was taken as the basis for creating a league table purporting to show the worst performing councils in England.

Davies’ letter stated that “the method used to compile these indicators into a league table is fundamentally flawed. For example, awarding average scores to councils who don’t deliver a particular service automatically rates them higher than half of the councils that do deliver those services”.

“Significant nuances” are missed in the league table approach, the LGA said, with “consideration of data alone without any context, and the focus on a limited number of indicators” providing “a snapshot and not the full picture”.

Oflog’s Local Authority Data Explorer also does not cover the entire range of council services, the LGA noted.

In his letter, Davies highlighted that the indicator used by Oflog on debt uses core spending power, “which is a measure of the funding that the government makes available for service delivery, but it excludes several important elements that may be contributing to the servicing of debt, such as service income, housing rents and investment income”.

He said this has the effect, among other things, “of making councils with housing revenue accounts ‘perform’ worse on this metric since their debt for housing is included, but not their means of servicing it”.

Davies concluded his letter by noting that the LGA is now being questioned about what Oflog is doing to “explain the limits of the data it publishes and how this should be used responsibly”, and asked Gove how the “trust and confidence of the sector” could now be rebuilt.

He wrote: “I urge you to reflect on the objectives you set Oflog in February: to inform, to warn, and to support. Oflog’s lack of action to correct misleading information calls into question its ability to inform, and the consequent impact on trust in the sector will impact its ability to warn and support.”

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