One in three municipalities fail to provide mandatory policy indicators

Since 2017 Dutch municipalities are obliged to provide information in their budget and realization on external recruitment, overhead and formation. Open State research showed that one in three municipalities was not providing on or more of these five mandatory indicators. Some numbers were not accurate and others seemed to be the result of a faulty calculation. Open State calls for stronger enforcement and the central collection of these data to guarantee accessibility and maximum insight.

Policy indicators are figures that supervisors, council-members, journalists and other governments use to compare and benchmark municipalities. Since 2017 municipalities have to give insight in numbers about formation, overhead and external recruitment according to standardized definitions. Open State and the Dutch Association of Municipalities manually collected the data from 380 municipal pdf-budget documents. The work is labor-intensive and one in three municipalities lack one or more numbers. Open State calls on the Dutch Ministry of Interior Affairs to collect the data in the future and release the bundled dataset as open data.

 

Policy indicators on the map

Below you can find five visualizations of the policy indicators. The collected open dataset can be found here.

• Bezetting (FTE per 1.000 inwoners): opgenomen door 310 van de 380 gemeenten

• Formatie FTE per 1.000 inwoners): opgenomen door 310 van de 380 gemeenten

• Apparaatskosten (kosten per inwoner): opgenomen door 292 van de 380 gemeenten

• Externe inhuur (Kosten als % van totale loonsom + totale kosten inhuur externen): opgenomen door 291 van de 380 gemeenten

• Overhead (% van totale lasten): opgenomen door 306 van de 380 gemeenten

Disclaimer: Open State and VNG Realisatie worked hard to ensure the correctness of the data. But due to the manual collection of the data, mistakes cannot be excluded.