How Highland Council performs

Highland Council members will consider a report tomorrow which sets out how Highland Council performs compared to other Local Authorities in Scotland.

The benchmarking framework reports on how much councils spend on particular services, service performance and how satisfied people are with the major services provided by councils. The framework represents all the significant areas of local government spend in 2013/14.

The 4 year trend analysis of indicators at a national level shows some significant variation in results from Council to Council.

Local Authorities vary enormously in size and population distribution, deprivation levels and physical geography and therefore benchmarking statistics and their interpretation is very complex.

Of the 55 indicators Highland has 10 indicators in the top quartile and 14 indicators in the bottom quartile.

Notable indicators include:

• One of lowest cost per attendance at sports facilities and museums
• The second lowest staff sickness absence
• Higher than average street cleanliness
• Higher costs of waste collection per household (may be explained by delivering services to a dispersed population over a huge geographical area)
• Lower than average roads maintenance costs
• Lower than  the average in meeting Scottish Quality Housing Standards, however, significant improvement has been made over the past 4 years
• The number of unemployed people assisted into Council employability programmes is lower than average, but has more than doubled over 2 years.

Convener Jimmy Gray said: “The new national approach to benchmarking is important in helping us to identify areas where we have really good performance in delivery of service whilst managing costs and areas where we need to focus on improvement.”

For further information on Highland Council’s performance and to “see how we compare”, see our website at  http://www.highland.gov.uk/performance