The Local Outcomes Framework, Whitehall's new approach to council performance after abolishing Oflog, accepts that place matters. Each council is to be compared with ‘statistical neighbours' chosen on 21 contextual measures, rather than dropped into a simple league table. So far so good.
My modelling of councils this autumn finds local circumstances (deprivation, ethnic diversity, age, education, population density) explain 82% of the variation in satisfaction with the local area and 91% of that in trust in neighbours, both framework measures.
Yet for most of the service measures in the framework, local circumstances explain less than 30%. That means one standard set of neighbours applied to every outcome will flatter some councils and condemn others.
The fix is cheap. For each metric, publish the score a council is expected to achieve given its circumstances, based on what others have achieved, and the gap between that and what it actually achieved. Ipsos MORI's Frontiers of Performance studies did exactly this more than 15 years ago. Once context was allowed for, several of the most deprived councils, notably in inner London, outperformed expectations.
Two other gaps. The framework asks how people feel about their area, but apart from care users and carers rating social care, it never asks what they actually think of their council. And the area measures depend on the Department for Culture, Media and Sport and the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government paying to boost the Community and Engagement Survey (formerly Community Life), which the framework itself calls a matter for departmental business planning, but the Budget this month won't help.
Finally, the tool for councils to use to measure all this. Promised for 2026, it has yet to appear. The framework was updated on 14 September and still says only that government ‘intends' to launch it this year. Ministers could add expected scores and one tried and tested question about the council itself and publish before Christmas.
Ben Page is visiting professor at King's College London
