Worst-performing councils in England revealed — where does yours rank?

Nottingham city council is the worst local authority in England, while Torridge district council in Devon is the best, according to government performance statistics that expose huge variations in public sector efficiency across the country.

The data, published by a new agency, the Office for Local Government (Oflog), reveals that some councils have recycling rates that are twice as good as others and that some authorities are failing to process half of planning applications on time while others are not late on a single one.

Ministers set up Oflog last summer to provide “authoritative and accessible” performance data to support improvement in local government. The agency’s figures, published before local elections on Thursday, also show the extent to which councils are struggling with debts, with six local authorities already having declared themselves effectively bankrupt since 2021.

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Fifty local authorities now owe at least ten times their core budget, and 34 are spending more than £1 in every £3 they receive in tax and government grants on interest payments.

Oflog measures councils across 27 categories in five main areas: waste management, corporate and finance, adult social care, planning and roads. Analysis of this data by The Times showed that Nottingham city council, which declared itself bankrupt in November, was the worst performing authority, scoring in the bottom five per cent of councils for waste processing, financial management and roads and the bottom 25 per cent for planning. It was also in the bottom 40 per cent for social care.

The Labour-run authority recycled only a quarter of household waste, whereas Barnsley council, which Labour also controls, recycled more than half. The best performing councils recycled nearly two thirds of waste.

Nottingham also had three times as many complaints upheld per 100,000 population as councils such as Chorley, Exeter and Lancaster, while it managed to collect a lower proportion of business rates than almost every other council.

The council — whose chief executive is Mel Barrett, on £191,000 a year, £24,000 more than the prime minister’s salary — blames its financial woes on cuts in government funding, rising demand for social services and high inflation. However, others have pointed to mismanagement including the loss of nearly £40 million on a failed energy supplier.

At the other end of the performance scale, Torridge district council, on the north Devon coast, was rated highly for almost everything it does. Last year, for example, it did not have a single complaint upheld by the local government ombudsman. It ranks in the top 5 per cent of councils for waste processing and financial management and has one of the best planning departments. As a district council, it is not responsible for social care or local roads. Torridge is run by a group of independent councillors and its chief executive is Steve Hearse, who is paid £109,000 a year.

Oflog’s data also reveals large variations in performance between similar councils in similar parts of the country. For example, in the year to September 2022, Hinckley & Bosworth borough council in the East Midlands completed less than half of household planning applications on time yet Tamworth borough council, only 30 miles away, was not late on any. Derbyshire county council had the worst-maintained roads in the country yet neighbouring Warwickshire county council was among the best on that measure.

Recycling rates also varied massively between Britain’s major cities. In Birmingham, the council managed to recycle only 23 per cent of waste, while Bristol achieved 46 per cent.

Tony Travers, a professor of local government at the London School of Economics, believes poorly performing councils are “almost certainly” failing to do enough to learn from best. He said: “Some could change the way they deliver services to get better outcomes. But at the moment, there’s very little consistently published information that would allow councils to go beyond just seeing the data without getting a sense of what they need to change.”

The Taxpayers’ Alliance praised the best-run councils as “rays of sunshine amid storm clouds of trouble” and said the worst-run authorities must do more to improve.

Joanna Marchong, from the group, said: “In order to achieve a high level of public sector efficiency, the worst-performing councils should look towards the best to ensure that they adopt sensible and worthwhile changes.”

The Local Government Association (LGA) said there were already mechanisms in place, such as its Inform benchmarking system, to help councils learn from each other. It cautioned against reading too much into Oflog’s data.

Abi Brown, of the LGA, said: “Councils continue to face huge financial challenges, with individual authorities facing competing demands on budgets that are often unique to their local area and specific circumstances. While councils continue to transform services, it is unsustainable to expect them to keep doing more for less in the face of unprecedented cost and demand pressures.”

With a third of councils in England facing local elections this week, the data suggests authorities that are not dominated by one of the two main political parties perform better. Of the ten worst-performing councils, six are controlled by Labour, one by the Conservatives and three are in coalition. Of the ten best-performing councils, six are in coalition or are run by independents, while the Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives run two each.

There is a similar pattern when councils are compared by type. Eight of the ten worst-performing county councils or rural unitary authorities are controlled by the Conservatives, while seven of the best-performing ten are in coalition or run by independents. The best-performing metropolitan authorities and the best-performing district councils are also more likely to have no single political party in overall control.

Travers added: “If there is a chance of a change of political control it must, other things being equal, be more likely to produce good government. It is also easy to see that having a council where there is little or no opposition, or little chance of a change in administration, could lead to bad outcomes.”

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Nottingham council, which is holding elections this week, pointed out that some of the Oflog data was now two or three years old and said smaller councils were “less directly relatable”. It highlighted having recently opened a new central library, one of the best public transport systems in the country and parks that maintained their Green Flag status. However, it acknowledged that there was “work to do”.

The authority said: “We are clear that more improvement is required and we need to move further and faster to become an authority that delivers best value for taxpayers, consistent with good practice elsewhere in local government. We are committed to making these changes.”

Hearse, the chief executive of Torridge council, said he was cautious about council league tables because they lacked context but was proud that Torridge had done well. He said his council’s success was down to prudent management, such as not investing in commercial property and keeping waste-management services in-house.

He said: “We operate our own fleet [of rubbish trucks] and have our own staff recycling. We also work quite hard on educating the public and that’s helping improve recycling rates.”

He added that Torridge had invested in planning to improve performance. “We’ve got the staffing structures in place and have been able to recruit. We’ve also taken an approach of what we call ‘growing your own’. We’ve brought in apprentices and graduates and trained them internally. So we’ve invested our time as well.”

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Hinckley council said it had recently improved its planning performance and over the past year had processed 87 per cent of applications on time. It said previous challenges were due to a “combination of recruitment difficulties and a huge increase in planning applications”.

Derbyshire council said it surveyed its roads differently from other local authorities, making comparisons potentially misleading. It also pointed out that it maintained roads in the High Peak, where it can be much colder and wetter than most places, taking a toll on the lifespan of the road surface. “We are doing everything we can to make the money we get go as far as possible,” it said, including a £120 million capital programme of road resurfacing over the past three years.

Birmingham council acknowledged that it needed to improve recycling rates and said it had developed a plan to do so, including introducing weekly food waste recycling. Comparisons between councils did not take into account key factors such as “the built environment, the types of housing and demographics”, it said.

How The Times analysed Oflog data to rank councils

The Office for Local Government (Oflog) publishes data from England’s local authorities in 27 categories in five main areas: waste management, corporate and finance, adult social care, planning and roads. The idea is to make it easy for councils, the public, academics and journalists to see how different councils are performing and to support improved performance.

The Times chose to examine only categories where each council’s performance could be considered a factor in the outcome measured, such as the number of planning applications completed on time, rather than categories the council cannot control, such as the number of requests per population for social care. This means we used Oflog’s data across 21 of the 27 categories.

In each of these chosen categories, we ranked each council in order from best to worst and gave them a score based on their position, so the worst performer would be given one point and the best performer a top score based on the number of councils performing that function.

To keep it simple, each category was given the same weighting, so a council would score no higher for doing well on planning than it would for doing well on recycling, for example. Where a council did not perform a function, such as district councils with social care, or where there was no data from a council in a specific category, we awarded the authority the average score for that category. We then added up the scores to give a ranking in each of the five main areas and an overall ranking to judge broader performance.

The data was downloaded between January and March this year, using the most up-to-date figures provided by Oflog at that time, which means the data in some categories may have been superseded by newer figures.