Harringay, Haringey - So Good they Spelt it Twice!
Haringey Council performance ranked 308th of 318 by the Times newspaper - a fair ranking?
This morning, in an article named "Worst-performing councils in England revealed — where does yours rank?", The Times published what it says is a ranking of the performance of English Councils.
Haringey ranked as 308th out of 318. Both 'Roads' and 'Planning' are ranked in the upper quartile, whilst 'Finance', 'Waste' and' Social Care' were bottom quartile.
The newspaper explained how it calculated its results as follows:
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using the most up-to-date figures provided by Oflog at that time, which means the data in some categories may have been superseded by newer figures.
It's easy to reach for one's stock reaction and complain about Haringey, (It seems that wherever people live, they complain about their council), but from an end-user point of view, the waste ranking didn't seem quite right. So I quickly found the Oflog data and had a very brief look. What that quickest of scans tells me is that, as you'd expect, the stats warrant some unpacking. For example, the waste metric seems mainly to be about recycling rates. I don't see any metrics about resident satisfaction, removal of dumped rubbish etc. I've attached a pdf summary from the LGA website, comparing Haringey data with that from other London boroughs.
The Times piece is helpful in that it drew my attention to the data, but a more considered analysis of the data is needed and would have been welcomed.
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Park on
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Just interacting with the Disabled Facilities Grant team is a Sisyphean task of endless despair.
They are incompetent, regularly in breach of their duty and have no desire to change or improve. Sums up the whole Council!
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Permalink Reply by Michael Anderson on
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I’m really sorry to hear that. Have you heard about an organisation called a Foundations that can help with applications for the grant? https://www.foundations.uk.com/how-we-help/adapt-my-home/
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I'm not sure about those ratings. I work for a local authority, for close to 2 decades, and find them a very good employer and LA (my husband also runs a business there and we used to live there and can judge from other sources,). However, it also ranked in the second half. I'd take it with a pinch of salt. I can however say that social care is a notorious problem in Haringey - both in adults and children. And they have one of their worst ratings in there.
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I suspired, Its way better than it should be. Haringey Council simply don't care.
I'm disabled and am constantly having the same core issue again and again. They do not listen.
I've been disabled 13 years, I'm the expert you them saying i should do XYZ, does not make it true.
The Adult Social Care have been making the same error with complaints for years. ASC Complaints have a single stage. ASC have since 2019 been incorrectly saying you need stage two, adding delays to the process.
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Permalink Reply by Pamela Harling on
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Yes, it is easy to "bash the Council". However, it seems to me as personal experience, that, suffering from huge budget cuts, Council departments are very under resourced. Staff are overworked and just not on top of their briefs. In addition they often don't live in the Borough (I get the impression), so seem to be rather vague about what it is actully like to live in Haringey. There seems to be reluctance to work with what local groups are already achieving and, of course, getting to grips with such a diverse range of communities brings enormous challenges. I don't feel we are getting this right in the Borough. Where do we have spaces to meet together and talk things over? Anyway, just my thoughts.
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