Scottish Councils League Tables: All 29 Scottish local council areas ranked definitively from 'best to worst'

The huge variation in public service performance across Scotland’s 32 local authority areas has been revealed an analysis by The Sunday Times.

The data reveals certain councils are recycling twice as much as others, while some residents are half as likely to have their first cancer treatment within 62 days as those in other areas.

The Sunday Times rankings looked at geographical areas covered by each council and the public services provided within those regions. The responsibility for some of those services falls under the remit of different bodies; for instance, health services are run by NHS boards.

The rankings were achieved using 11 indicators from five key categories; education, health, community, policing and finance. Weighting was applied by population size and the importance of each category, with health and education deemed the most important.

Highland Council, the largest local authority by area in the UK, emerged as having the worst public services in Scotland.  In particular, it ranked bottom for both health and education out of 29 mainland council areas.

East Renfrewshire came top of the Sunday Times table, including the best results for education and community.

Highland Council – which has a population of 235,000 – performed weakest in literacy. Just 65 per cent of P1, P4 and P7 pupils achieve the expected level in the subject. By comparison, 88 per cent of pupils in East Renfrewshire do.

And more than half of household waste in Highland is landfilled, with only 37 per cent recycled. This makes the council one of the worst in the country for managing its rubbish and East Renfrewshire – where only 2.4 per cent is dumped in the ground and 58 per cent recycled – the best.

Scotland’s big cities didn’t fare strongly. Glasgow City had a strong performance for health services, but weaker for education. Edinburgh City was bottom of the table for crime and spending per head.

Ayrshire was a strong performer with North Ayrshire, East Ayrshire and South Ayrshire council areas all in the final top 10. The best performing area for crime was Aberdeenshire.

Three councils, Orkney Islands, Shetland Islands and the Western Isles, were excluded from these rankings and scored separately because of a huge variation in population size and different methods of data collection.

Magnus Llewellin, editor of The Times and Sunday Times Scotland: “We all understand that where you live has a huge bearing on your quality of life. But quantifying those differences across areas such as health, education, community and crime isn’t readily available for readers.

“That is why the Sunday Times has carried out this analysis across Scotland. It gives people a measure of the differences which, in a number of cases, are stark.”

The huge variation in public service performance across Scotland’s 32 local authority areas has been revealed in this analysis by The Sunday Times.