"As part of our role to support and improve local government, the LGA is committed to helping councils to be as efficient and effective as possible."
Responding to analysis by the Times on council performance, Cllr Abi Brown, Chairman of the Local Government Association’s Improvement and Innovation Board, said:
“Councils continue to face huge financial challenges, with individual local authorities facing competing demands on budgets that are often unique to their local area and specific circumstances. Differences in spending between councils are natural responses to these differing needs while we also know that variation in spending on certain services is often driven by factors outside the control of councils, such as deprivation and demographics.
“While councils continue to transform services, it is unsustainable to expect them to keep doing more for less in the face of unprecedented cost and demand pressures.
“However, as part of our role to support and improve local government, the LGA is committed to helping councils to be as efficient and effective as possible.
“Our publicly available and accessible LG Inform benchmarking system includes the latest published data to compare each council with other similar authorities and we run programmes in all regions to share best practice, help drive up performance and support councils to make efficiency savings against the challenging financial backdrop they face.”