Developing performance indicators for local government: The Scottish experience

Abstract

The Value for Money (VFM) approach to public sector finance, together with the Citizen's Charter, has placed considerable emphasis on developing performance indicators (PIs) for evaluating local government. Despite the publicity given to the approach by some practitioners and consultants, the state of the art is primitive and fraught with methodological problems. The conventional wisdom is to recognize these and argue for refinement. However, current PIs are inadequate as the basis for inter‐authority comparison, and should be more appropriately termed ‘local government statistics’. The reality is that the methodology of VFM is less developed than its terminology.