Local councils provide a wide range of services for their communities. To help the organisation and residents understand how well the council is performing across this range of services we participate in comprehensive performance scrutiny through the Local Government Benchmarking Framework (LGBF).
The Framework brings together performance indicators covering information about a wide range of key services including education, housing, social work, and leisure, as well as service costs and citizen satisfaction results. Data for every Council in Scotland is published annually, in around February, for the previous full year. This gives information on performance over time and also the relative performance of each Council – a ranking.
To support this comparative work, the Improvement Service produces an annual overview report. This report contains highlights of performance information for each Council against each indicator in the framework.
The publication of the 2022/23 overview report in 2023 represents the 12th year of comparative benchmarking data.
Within West Dunbartonshire Council, each service area reviews the indicators which fall within their remit, scrutinising performance and trend information on each indicator. This complements the performance information already available and in turn informs actions incorporated in service and department plans to sustain or improve performance.
This performance information informs service planning and is detailed in the Delivery Plan for each Strategic Service area. LGBF data complements a range of performance information used by services, published as part of the Council’s public performance reporting.
The work underway in each department, linked to service planning, will ensure a focus on continuous improvement through identification of performance requiring review. This is in line with our emphasis on continuous improvement through an ongoing process of citizen feedback, benchmarking and consultation.