Oflog should cover town and parish councils, National Association of Local Councils says

The National Association of Local Councils (NALC) has called for the Office for Local Government's (Oflog) remit to include England's 10,000 parish and town councils.

Responding to Oflog's recent invitation for views on the organisation's next steps, NALC said it supports the overall rationale behind Oflog but urged the organisation to cover "every type of local authority".

Oflog was launched in July of this year with the strategic objectives to "empower citizens" with information about their council, increase local leaders' and councils' understanding of their performance, and increase central government's understanding of local government performance.

Its main function is to provide data and analysis about the performance of local government

The organisation plans to publish data on all other council types except town and parish councils.

In its response, NALC stated that: "Oflog's remit should also include [town and parish councils] as they are the first tier of local government in England and responsible for spending nearly £1 billion of council tax on a wide range of hyper local services, as well as having a wider community leadership and place-shaping role."

NALC said  it is "keen to strengthen" the accountability and transparency of such councils and put them up for more scrutiny as a way of increasing their effectiveness and driving improvement.

"Therefore, while we agree that Oflog should start off small and build and mature over time, in the medium-term Oflog's scope and functions should expand to cover local councils," it continued.

It urged Oflog to conduct a pilot with NALC's 'Super Councils Network', which comprises 120 town and parish councils.

NALC also set out the themes that it wishes Oflog to gather data on, which included:

• local elections
• neighbourhood planning
• Code of Conduct complaints
• sport, leisure, and recreational services (including libraries)
• parks and green spaces
• Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman complaints
• climate change mitigation and adaptation
• finance (including precepts, expenditure, assets, borrowing and reserves)
• audit (including Public Interest Reports)

The organisation also called for the Government to digitise the Annual Governance and Accountability Return process to allow councils to submit their data online instead of by completing a paper form.

Adam Carey