Statistics, damned statistics, and, BVPIs?

Every Overview and Scrutiny committee of the council reviews a subset of BVPIs (Best Value Performance Indicators). Last night there were a few cynical comments about accuracy, necessity and coherency of the set of indicators we use.

I have a foot in both camps. Whilst I think that some statistics can be nonsense when they aren't designed to encourage specific desired behaviours, and therefore simply become numbers that 'they' want to see, it's also possible that these indicators can truly show how well we are doing. This is the case for many of our Community stats, and I hope will continue to do so. There are things that Waverley do really well, and we should be proud of them.