What is Oflog for?
Oflog – A new Office for Local Government
This summer saw the launch of a new Office within the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (DLUHC). I confess it passed me by.
Oflog stands for the Office for Local Government, and given the significant role played by local government in all our daily lives, it seems sensible to try and understand what it’s actually for!
The official picture of Oflog
The DLUHC says that the new Office will provide authoritative and accessible data and analysis about the performance of local government, and support its improvement.
Oflog’s strategic objectives are to:
• empower citizens with information about their local authority, enabling them to hold local leaders to account;
• increase local leaders’ and councils’ understanding of their relative performance, supporting them to improve and better innovate;
• increase central government’s understanding of local government performance, highlighting excellence and identifying risk of failure to facilitate timely and targeted support.
Oflog’s activities will include:
• presenting data on local government performance in a clear and accessible way;
• celebrating the success of high-performing local authorities, and helping others to learn lessons from them;
• identifying local authorities at risk of potential failure, and helping to arrange support for them
Interaction with the ombudsman
The Local Government And Social Care Ombudsman (LGSCO) is keen to explain the differences in their roles. It says that the job of Oflog is to provide the information that will help citizens hold their local authority to account, and councils see how they are doing compared with others. As noted above, the Government also wants Oflog to help spot councils that might be at risk of failing, so it can give support when needed.
On the other hand, complaints about councils are still entirely within the remit of LGSCO. Oflog is not involved in this, but it may use the ombudsman’s data on complaints in the future as part of its local authority data explorer tool. This is further recognition of the important role that good complaint management plays in high performing councils.
Local council perspective
It is an exciting opportunity for councils to have access to data that is usable and comparable, so that they can ensure they are learning from other local authorities where improvements can be made in their services. Also, the ability to spot warning signs early when a council may be getting into trouble is valuable.
On the flip side, there is some concern about the independence of Oflog, given that it is within the DLUHC. If it is seen as an arm of central government, it will be very difficult to build trust with local councils. It needs to ensure that it is transparent about the way data is used to identify failing councils, and avoid imposing too narrow definitions of what success looks like.
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Further reading and resources
You can access the local authority data explorer tool here (external link will open in a new browser tab or window)
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