DEVELOPING PERFORMANCE INDICATORS FOR LOCAL-GOVERNMENT - THE SCOTTISHEXPERIENCE

The Value for Money (VFM) approach to public sector finance, together with the Citizen's Charter, has placed considerable emphasis on develo ping performance indicators (PIs) for evaluating local government. Des pite the publicity given to the approach by some practitioners and con sultants, the state of the art is primitive and fraught with methodolo gical problems. The conventional wisdom is to recognize these and argu e for refinement. However, current PIs are inadequate as the basis for inter-authority comparison, and should be more appropriately termed ' local government statistics'. The reality is that the methodology of V FM is less developed than its terminology.