The Independent Authority for Fiscal Responsibility (AIReF) has added new features to the Local Government Monitor, designed to enable a more comprehensive, flexible and visual assessment of the financial position of city councils and other local corporations.
These improvements form part of the Monitor’s financial sustainability risk analysis module, which helps determine whether a local corporation can meet its current and future spending and obligations without jeopardising its financial stability.
The Monitor expands its analytical capabilities through three complementary views:
- Indicator-based view. This view allows users to assess sustainability risk using any one of six key indicators: financial debt relative to current revenue; average payment period to suppliers; cash surplus relative to revenue; time required to return to a sustainable debt level; time required to return to an overall sustainable position; and the non-financial balance relative to revenue. It includes filters by Autonomous Region and population group, as well as an interactive map that supports the territorial interpretation of the results.
- Entity-based view. This view provides a detailed profile of a specific local corporation, displaying its values across each of the reference indicators.
- Autonomous Region and population view. This view shows how local corporations are distributed by risk level for a given indicator, broken down by Autonomous Region and population group, and indicating both the share of entities and the share of the population affected.
More flexible analysis
With these changes, the Monitor supports a more flexible assessment of financial sustainability from multiple perspectives – by indicator, by entity, and by Autonomous Region and population. Users can review each indicator on its own, examine the position of a specific local corporation, or assess how risk levels are distributed across territories and population groups. This makes the data easier to interpret, helps identify meaningful patterns and comparisons, and supports a more flexible analysis tailored to the needs of each enquiry.
With these new features, the Local Government Monitor strengthens its commitment to transparency and public communication by providing access to relevant information on the management and sustainability of public finances.
The Monitor brings together information from nearly 8,200 local corporations and more than 20 million data points, and is designed so that anyone – with or without an economics background – can check the financial position of their local corporation.
