To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what steps her Department is taking to monitor the environmental performance of local authorities.
Answered on
25 May 2023
The Office for Local Government (Oflog) is being established within the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (DLUHC).
Oflog will be a data-driven body with the purpose of providing a transparent and authoritative source of information about the performance of local government. This will support greater accountability as well as driving efficiency. The focus of Oflog will be to bring together data on local government performance in a holistic way and draw insight from it. By providing a single and authoritative source of the information about local government performance, it will support local leaders with decision-making and improvement; allow central government to maintain standards for good governance and leadership and identify how money is being used; and help communities to better understand what is happening in their area and whether services are being delivered effectively and represent value for their money.
We have been working with local government colleagues to co-design the set of measures Oflog will use, across just a small number of themes in the first instance. These initial themes have been selected to give coverage of different types of local authority; they do not suggest a prioritisation of services, and we will add more themes over time.
Oflog will enable comparison of local authority performance, including on the environment.
DLUHC is working towards launching Oflog early this summer. The first tranche of metrics is due to be agreed shortly, and includes waste metrics that Defra is providing. This will be just the first step in an iterative process of working with local government colleagues as we build Oflog’s capabilities and develop metrics covering the breadth of local authority functions. An expanded group of environmental metrics is due to be agreed next year.