Each council has to tick 12.6m boxes a year for Whitehall, claims LGA

The Local Government Association has urged ministers to slash the reporting burden on local authorities, after publishing research claiming that the average council has to “tick an estimated 12.6 million boxes a year to meet the bureaucratic demands of Whitehall”.

The research – which involved the LGA and councils examining all available returns on the government’s draft single data list – suggested that the average single tier authority is required to report 43,000 different pieces of information.

“Some of that reporting requires the entry of tens-of-thousands of individual facts covering every pupil, householder receiving benefits, or resident using a particular service in a local area, taking the total number of data entries to more than 12 million,” the Association said, claiming that it costs each council £1.8m a year in staff time and other resources to collate and report the required information.

The Department for Communities and Local Government is expected to publish the final Single Data List shortly. The LGA admitted that there was “some subjective decision making” in arriving at the totals, but insisted that the researchers only tried to make reasonable assumptions.

Baroness Margaret Eaton, LGA Chairman, said: “The time consuming and costly burden of collecting and reporting data into the black hole of Whitehall bureaucracy is simply unsustainable. The local government workforce will be reduced by 140,000 posts this year in order to save money for frontline services. That reduction in staff needs to be matched, if not bettered, by a reduction in the box ticking demands being placed on councils, so staff can focus their energy on delivering the more than 700 local services residents want and need.

“We eagerly await the release of DCLG’s Single Data List and hope it signals the start of a concerted and ongoing attempt to reduce the data reporting burden currently on local authorities.”