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using the most up-to-date figures provided by Oflog at that time, which means the data in some categories may have been superseded by newer figures.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.