It is important that councils regularly review their services to understand what value the community gets from them, and then use this information to adjust their services to manage costs. This can also guide their decisions on implementing new services and reducing or removing services.

Our service prioritisation tool helps councils be confident that they are allocating funding to high-value services. It aligns with the long-term financial sustainability of councils. We developed the tool as part of our report Managing the sustainability of local government services (Report 2: 2019–20), where we provide guidance on prioritising service delivery, as well as measuring service performance and allocating corporate overhead costs to services.

See our blog post: Are you delivering the services your community values?.

Via our interactive data dashboard for local government, you can find your local council to explore its financial audit data and compare to other councils.

The first page of each better practice tool provides guidance on how to use it, including which sections you may edit and input information into. To protect the tools’ integrity and functionality, certain cells, worksheets, and general formatting may be locked and are not editable; this does not inhibit use of the tool itself.

Managing the sustainability of local government services

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Report 2: 2019–20

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• Tabled date: 25 September 2019

Read the report