Purpose / Remit

1. To serve as the custodians of the SLAED Indicators Framework; develop, continually improve and maintain the suite of performance indicators to ensure their relevance as appropriate measurements of local economic development services provided by Scottish local authorities; provide guidance and clarification to councils in defining and reporting on indicators to support consistency in performance measurement.
2. To provide strategic oversight and instruction to SLAED business support contractor in relation to the annual exercise to commission, collate and report on data returns under the Indicators Framework to ensure a high quality product delivered to timetable.
3. To ensure indicator data is collected routinely and consistently by councils as part of their ongoing performance management processes; members of this group to be the lead representatives for their councils in ensuring reliable data is produced within agreed timescales to support the performance reporting process.
4. To encourage and support active use and analysis of data to understand performance in economic development interventions and drive improvements in service delivery; to articulate the value added by local economic development services.
5. To engage in national discussions around performance management across the public sector and wider performance frameworks; in particular to support relevant measurement of local economic development activity through the Local Government Benchmarking Framework.
6. To promote and facilitate regular conversations and workshops involving the sharing and adoption of good practice in service delivery, drawing on performance information and on an ongoing collection of good practice case studies from across SLAED’s and member councils’ activities.
7. To ensure performance management and improvement is maintained as a key theme across all of SLAED’s groups and operations.

Current / Forward work programme

• Drawing on experiences from the 2014-15 exercise, liaise with relevant strategic and thematic groups on improvements to the Indicators Framework for 2015/16; update guidance and templates as appropriate.
• Investigate consistent systems for data collation; identify what works well and share good practice across SLAED membership in the recording, collection and reporting of data.
• Instruct and manage the SLAED business support contractor in relation to the 2015-16 indicators exercise.
• Engage in the ongoing review of the Local Government Benchmarking Framework to influence the use of indicators that reasonably reflect the performance of local economic development services.
• Pursue and maintain an ongoing supply of good practice case studies to publish on SLAED website and to inform discussions and workshops in sharing practice.

Topical Notes

This area is under development.