accountability

LGOF: CPA-lite or Daily Mail target practice?  

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Jason Lowther

In July, then Local Government Minister Jim McMahon announced a new Local Government Outcomes Framework (LGOF), which (he said) “forms an integral part of this Government’s reforms to ensure we have a sector which is fit, legal and decent”.  These reforms are already pretty extensive, including LG reorganisation, devolution, community engagement, member standards and funding arrangements.

The LGOF framework, the Minister hoped, “will help to put the right checks and balances in place to ensure value for the taxpayer and results for citizens to whom councils are ultimately responsible”.  Given the removal of most systematic monitoring of local performance and outcomes in England with the demise of the Audit Commission a decade ago, is this a new dawn for helpful local insights and intelligent central steering, or the raw material for a crude league table that obscures more than it illuminates?

History shows the difficulty of designing and using performance measures effectively.  Whilst the logic of measuring what matters to inform management (and political) decision making is clear, and there are many examples of successful applications, there are enough examples of failures and unintended negative consequences to encourage caution. 

The immediate precursor to LGOF was a set of measures developed by the ill-fated Office of Local Government (OFLOG).  These were immediately manipulated by the Times newspaper into a league table, labelling Nottingham as the worst council.  The fact that this took place during the pre-election period only made the impact more negative, leading to a stinging letter from the LGA to the then Secretary of State, Michael Gove.  OFLOG was in some ways set up to fail.  Sited inside the Ministry, its political independence was immediately open to challenge.  And reconciling providing local authorities with better data at the same time as acting as an accountability mechanism to central government was always going to be tricky. 

The health service experience of performance measures and targets presents mixed evidence.  It appears that four-hour A&E waiting times targets were associated with reduced mortality, but at the same time there were examples of departments admitting patients near to the time limit at the expense of others more in need of urgent care, a few examples of blatant misrepresentation of figures, and some bizarre holding of patients in ambulances and redefinition of corridors as wards.

Key lessons from these examples include the importance of having a clear focus for the LGOF and the adoption of a broad ‘exploratory’ approach to presenting the performance measures.   As the Institute for Government argued for OFLOG, a key contribution could be making data more consistently available, comparable and usable – and hence supporting evidence-based policy making through the deliberative use of robust evidence.

The LGOF data needs to be presented in ways that enable and encourage exploration and questioning, rather than simplistic league tables which ignore the inherent differences between different councils in terms of population, geography, deprivation, funding, etc.  It therefore needs exhibit what I call the three Cs: to be comparable across councils, contextualised to reflect local circumstances, and citizen-focussed (accessible to lay people).

There are many positive features of the new framework, including its attempt to look at missions and outcomes (rather than just council outputs).  Interested parties had until 12 September 2025 to respond to the Government’s consultation, so we now await the government’s response to that.  Councils can easily see how the proposed LGOF measures look for them using the excellent new LG Inform LGOF report. 

Dr Jason Lowther is Director of the Institute of Local Government Studies (INLOGOV) at the University of Birmingham.  This article was initially published in the Local Area Research and Intelligence Association (LARIA) newsletter. Email [email protected]

Disappearing Reform UK Councillors, Lord Mark Pack’s Poll Base, and me, etc.

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Chris Game

Literally minutes before I was going to email this already over-lengthy blog, I had my attention drawn to Birmingham’s rather paltry 5.4 score and 4th-from-bottom ranking on the HAYPP vape retailers’ ‘smell score’ scale – pretty well what it sounds like: UK cities ranked on perceived cleanliness. It seemed so obviously distorted by the lengthy bin collection strike and consequently not a lot better than Leeds’ 4.2, rather than up with at least, say, Newcastle (7.4) or even Liverpool (8.2). But, apart from those few lines, I let it pass.

So, on to my initial topic, which, as it happens, kicks off with some equally basic stats. Someone asked me recently – albeit after I’d slightly steered the conversation – if I knew whether (m)any of the several hundred new Reform UK councillors elected in the recent local elections (that I’d written about in a recent INLOGOV blog) had already left the party.  

I had to waffle a bit – after all, the 677 ‘new’ ones had taken Nigel Farage’s party’s national total to just over 850, and some/many undoubtedly shocked themselves. But I did happen to know that the number of recent resignations/suspensions/expulsions was already into double figures. To which I was able gratuitously to add that the party had also ‘lost’, at least for the time being, two of its six MPs.

Which might seem to suggest either that I have a particular academic interest in Farage’s indisputably fascinating party or that I’m some kind of political nerd – to neither of which I’ll readily admit.

No, the explanation for my having acquired this arcane knowledge is that for at least 30 years now I’ve known/known of (nowadays Baron) Mark Pack, his captivation with all things electoral, and his enthusiasm for sharing that captivation – dating back to when he was at the University of Exeter, just up the A38 from the University of Plymouth, original home of ‘(Colin) Rallings & (Michael) Thrasher’ (definitely local government statistical junkies), and now itself home of their internationally renowned Local Government Chronicle Elections Centre, and its/their matchless annual Local Election Handbooks.

Naturally, R&T’s interests and path-breaking publications focus primarily on local government elections. Those of (nowadays) Lord Pack of Crouch Hill (but Mark hereafter) include the Liberal Democrat Party, of which he’s currently an extremely active President; the House of Lords, and, as ever, political opinion polls, about all of which he writes invariably fascinating weekly newsletters; in addition to reporting on almost anything electoral. This and more he shares on his exceedingly lively website, the recommendation of which (to any readers unfamiliar with it) is the main purpose of this blog.

And so, belatedly, back to those disappearing Reform UK councillors. It’s the sort of phenomenon that Mark Pack revels in – the numbers, the reasons/circumstances, it’s all perfect material for a near-daily political diarist.  He naturally keeps a running list of councillors “shed by Reform UK” since the May elections, the most recent updating of which at the time of typing this paragraph being, I think, on July 7th, when the departee figure had reached a quite striking 11.

They comprised five straight resignations as councillors, two expulsions by Reform, three suspensions by the party, one of whom subsequently quit, and one who’d decided they’d prefer to be an Independent.  

As for the (female) Reform UK councillor charged with assault and criminal damage, for instance – well, it was covered, naturally, in Mark Pack’s diary on June 30th, and she’ll shortly be “appearing before magistrates”.  And, as the Crown Prosecution Service publicly emphasised, it’s “extremely important that there be no reporting or sharing of information online which could in any way prejudice ongoing proceedings.”    

Which brings us to the two of the all-time total of just six Reform MPs who already are no longer. First was Great Yarmouth MP Rupert Lowe, who back in March was suspended and reported to the police over alleged threats of physical violence towards the party’s Chairman, Zia Yusuf. And second, more recently, was James McMurdock, who “surrendered the party whip” a few weeks ago over, as The Guardian delicately put it, “questions of loans totaling tens of thousands of pounds.” 

The key, albeit belated, point of this blog, however, is the multifaceted contribution to our political world of Mark Park himself, rather than ‘here-today-gone-tomorrow’ MPs. Yes, he’s a copious diarist, but so much more. In particular, there’s his arguably greatest single contribution to our academic political world: the phenomenon that is what I still think of as his ‘PollBase’, but which comparatively recently has acquired the handle PollBasePro.

If you’re writing anything at all concerning our political world in the 90-plus years since 1938/39 – yes, before the start of World War II – and you need to know or even get a sense of the state of UK public opinion on a virtually month-by-month, and latterly week-by-week, basis, just Google either title, and it’s there, instantly accessible and downloadable. Yes, completely free – all Mark asks is that you point out any mistakes (!) and have the decency to acknowledge the source.

It’s a fabulous resource, easily worth – pretty obviously – a blog on its own, but all it’s going to get on this occasion is this abbreviated reference, kind of explaining why I’ve structured this blog in the way I have. That reference comes from p.2 of the dozens of pages, when the only pollster was Gallup and the only poll publisher the News Chronicle (1930-60, when it was “absorbed into the Daily Mail”).

From the start, in 1938, the sole question asked consistently was “Conservatives Good or Bad”, and, probably not surprisingly, throughout most of World War II, the Conservatives were overwhelmingly (75-90%) ‘Good’. Only from 1943 were questions asked about the other parties, and from the start Labour, polling consistently in the 40s, had a double-figure lead over the Conservatives, suggesting that voters were already clearly differentiating between the conduct of the war and the conduct of peace.

This came to a head in January 1946, when Labour, with 52.5%, outpolled the Conservatives by a massive 20.5%, a lead they’d never previously even approached and would do so just once again in the coming decades. Oh yes, and I was born at the very end of December 1945 – and, if only we’d known, my committed Tory-voting parents would have been deeply unhappy, and I’d have gurgled contentedly. Sorry about the length, but I had to squeeze that last bit in.

Chris Game is an INLOGOV Associate, and Visiting Professor at Kwansei Gakuin University, Osaka, Japan.  He is joint-author (with Professor David Wilson) of the successive editions of Local Government in the United Kingdom, and a regular columnist for The Birmingham Post.

Picture credit: https://www.facebook.com/nigelfarageofficial/posts/today-i-announced-29-local-councillors-have-joined-reform-uk-from-across-the-cou/1184319953049781/

The role of the Ombudsman within the Japanese Local Government System: The Example of Kawasaki City

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Professor Shunsuke Kimura

The ombudsman is an institution that serves as a voice for Parliament and the public, conducting administrative reviews through hearings and investigations of complaints and inquiries. Rooted in human rights protection, the ombudsman system monitors administrative agencies by directly addressing citizens’ claims.

This paper analyses the functions of the Japanese ombudsman system within the public policy framework, particularly considering Japan’s cultural characteristics. Despite its adoption by some local governments since 1990, the ombudsman institution has not gained widespread prominence across Japan. This raises questions regarding its effectiveness within the administrative dispute system and the reasons for its limited adoption. Research indicates that there are structural issues within Japan’s local administrative system that may hinder the mediation process.

The study employs original statistics sourced from interviews with ombudsmen from Kawasaki City, which was the first municipality to establish an ombudsman in 1990. The paper also highlights the presence of approximately 5,000 administrative advisors across Japan, which contrasts with the relatively small number of municipalities that have adopted the ombudsman system.

Municipal ombudsmen have contributed to addressing administrative grievances and improving local governance through reforms. The Japanese administrative dispute system comprises three subsystems: the administrative case litigation system, the administrative appeal system, and the grievance system, with the ombudsman system falling under the latter. (See Table1)

The ombudsman primarily addresses inadequate administrative actions, aiming to enhance administrative justice. Japan’s local government system consists of ordinary and special local governments, with prefectures and municipalities being the primary units.

The paper emphasizes that, unlike many countries, Japan does not have a national ombudsman system, only local government systems, which contributes to the unique characteristics of its public ombudsman framework. This framework includes legislative and executive types of ombudsmen, with the latter being more prominent in local governance.

This paper discusses the varying implementation of ombudsmen across municipalities, pointing out that their presence is particularly notable in designated cities. However, the diffusion of ombudsmen remains limited, with only 71 municipalities adopting the system.(See Table2)

This limitation can be attributed to cultural factors that prioritize group cohesion over individual expression, as well as historical beliefs regarding government infallibility.

The role of the ombudsman in Japan is further complicated by the lack of national oversight and the challenges in securing competent personnel. Additionally, existing administrative bodies with similar functions pose competition for the establishment of ombudsmen.

The study concludes that while the ombudsman system has not spread significantly, it plays a crucial role in addressing administrative issues and enhancing citizen participation. The future of the ombudsman system in Japan hinges on recognizing its value in promoting administrative justice and ensuring the protection of citizens’ rights. In summary, the Japanese ombudsman system, despite its limitations, has the potential to evolve as a vital mechanism for administrative accountability and citizen engagement, particularly in an era marked by increasing complexity in governance and citizen demands.

Professor Shunsuke Kimura, PhD, is Professor and Dean of Graduate School of Global Governance, Meiji University, Tokyo, Japan. PhD(law) at Hitotsubashi Univ. After retiring from Ministry of Internal-Affairs, he has been working as a professor. He has been a Visiting Scholar at Lille Univ. in 2023 and at the University of Birmingham (INLOGOV) in 2025.