What it costs to have the council exist at all as a democratic body — councillors, elections, the chief executive's office, civic functions — as opposed to delivering any actual service. It is a piece of the council's overhead, the running-the-organisation cost. Higher can mean a heavier head office; but a suspiciously tiny number usually means the council books these costs elsewhere in its accounts, not that it runs on thin air.
| name | corporate-and-democratic-core |
|---|---|
| dataset | 01-revenue-outturn |
| kind | extracted |
| type | numeric |
| unit | £000 per year |
| grain | council-year |
| role | feature |
| source | data/Revenue_Outturn_time_series_data_v3.2.csv, column `RO6_cencrp_net_cur_exp` |
| period | FY 2017-18 to 2024-25, annual (year_ending 201803-202503) |
| missingness | "Rows with status other than "submitted" (i.e. "total" aggregates and "not submitted") must be filtered out; a non-submitted council-year is a genuine gap, not zero. 2024-25 covers 410/411 councils. Councils abolished/created in 2017-25 reorganisations appear only for the years they existed. Values reflect each council's recharging conventions; near-zero values are usually accounting artefacts (aggressive recharging), not true absence of overhead." |
| score_note | Raw input to the overhead ratios; recharging conventions distort levels and the ratios carry the signal. |
| peer_group | council class (district / county / unitary / metropolitan / London) — not yet scored on the leaderboard |
Pure corporate overhead: leadership and democratic representation. Feeds the corporate overhead ratio. Sensitive to recharging conventions — treat extreme lows as accounting artefacts rather than leanness.