Managing the sustainability of local government services

Tabled Report 2: 2019–20

Tabled date

2019-09-25

Report year

2019-20

Community amenities Local government Regions

Entities audited

Not identified in the published HTML audit scope.

Recommendations

1. QAO's text Addressed to: all councils, especially those with a focus on improving sustainability consider whether

   they include sufficient details about their services within their existing planning documents or consider developing individual service plans (Chapter 2)

   Details about services should be scaled to the size and complexity of council and include:

   • how the service aligns to council’s strategy
   • the service level (for example, operating hours)
   • the assets used to deliver the service
   • operational risks for the service
   • operating costs and overhead costs.

2. QAO's text Addressed to: all councils, especially those with a focus on improving sustainability consider whether

   all existing services meet their community's current and future service needs and they deliver them at affordable levels by developing and undertaking regular reviews of existing services (Chapter 1)

3. QAO's text Addressed to: all councils, especially those with a focus on improving sustainability consider whether

   budget owners develop consistent individual business unit and service budgets by providing documented budget guidelines, templates, and training (Chapter 1)

4. QAO's text Addressed to: all councils, especially those with a focus on improving sustainability consider whether

   they benchmark their corporate overheads and allocate a reasonable proportion to services by developing and approving a corporate overhead methodology appropriate to the size and complexity of council (Chapter 1)

5. QAO's text Addressed to: all councils, especially those with a focus on improving sustainability consider whether

   they make decisions to deliver new services or amend existing services (associated with new major capital projects) with an understanding of the whole-of-life costs and any impact on corporate overheads

   Councils could develop their own or adopt an existing project decision framework that includes community engagement on the need for and level of new services. They could use the Queensland Treasury Corporation project decision framework and whole-of-life costing tool to develop their own framework or work together to share existing frameworks and tools (Chapter 1).

6. QAO's text Addressed to: all councils, especially those with a focus on improving sustainability consider whether

   they collect reliable and accurate information on the effectiveness and efficiency of their services.

   Councils could develop a performance monitoring and reporting framework to support both internal management reporting to council and external reports to their communities (Chapter 2).

7. QAO's text Addressed to: the Department of Local Government, Racing and Multicultural Affairs supports councils to develop

   models, benchmarks, and tools that are scalable for differently sized councils to allocate their corporate overheads to their services (Chapter 1)

   The department could, where appropriate, provide examples (templates), access to technical expertise and facilitate the development of tools for groups of councils.

8. QAO's text Addressed to: the Department of Local Government, Racing and Multicultural Affairs supports councils to develop

   a set of measures of effectiveness and efficiency to help councils monitor the performance of their services (Chapter 2).

   The department could develop a set of standard measures of councils’ common services for reference. It could also facilitate groups of similar councils to share existing resources or coordinate the development of new resources in partnership with existing council networks.

Authoritative report — Queensland Audit Office

Report PDF on QAO