  In this paper we investigate the role of local information in the decoding of
the repetition and surface error correction codes for the protection of quantum
states. Our key result is an improvement in resource efficiency when local
information is taken into account during the decoding process: the code
distance associated with a given logical error rate is reduced with a magnitude
depending on the proximity of the physical error rate to the accuracy threshold
of the code. We also briefly discuss an averaged approach with local
information for table-lookup and localised decoding schemes, an expected
breakdown of these effects for large-scale systems, and the importance of this
resource reduction in the near-term.
