County And City Managers Call On An Taisce To Recall Flawed Report
The County and City Managers’ Association (CCMA) is calling on An Taisce to recall its recent Report into planning among local authorities. The CCMA says An Taisce’s report is fundamentally flawed from a number of perspectives; “both the presentation of indicators and the reporting of statistics throughout the report are flawed and require further major revisions”, says Hubert Kearns, CCMA Chairman. The logic and justification for choosing the particular battery of indicators chosen by An Taisce is not given in the report. The authors of the report make no reference to the existing battery of performance indicators for local authorities (service indicators) which are publicly available and are independently verified on an annual basis.
Following initial queries which challenged the presentation of the results, An Taisce withdrew the original report. They have now republished the report with amended tables; however, the CCMA still have serious issues with the report. Their use of statistics and the method they use to rank local authorities is lacking any statistical rigour. They have used statistics in a blind fashion without appropriate quantitative analysis to back up their figures.
“There is a lack of clarity on what weighting, if any, has been applied to individual indicators chosen by An Taisce”, says Mr. Kearns. “The grading system developed by An Taisce is an ‘unbalanced scorecard’. The raw data used to generate the rankings and league tables should be presented as an Appendix to the report to ensure that the results can be verified. The unknown authors of the An Taisce report ought to have attached greater importance to the accurate use of statistics and the report is missing a chapter to explain clearly how the ranking model deals with weighting issues to ensure there is no urban or rural bias.”
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