What it costs the council each year just to collect council tax — sending bills, taking payments, chasing people who don't pay. You should care because this is pure administration: every pound spent here is a pound not spent on services. Lower looks better, but a very cheap operation that lets lots of bills go unpaid is a false economy, so this needs reading alongside how much tax actually gets collected.
| name | council-tax-collection-cost |
|---|---|
| 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_centax_cll_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." |
| score_note | Simple raw line, but meaningless without the rate from dataset 03; the constructed per-£ ratio supersedes it. |
| peer_group | council class (district / county / unitary / metropolitan / London) — not yet scored on the leaderboard |
Net cost of running the council tax collection function. Feeds tax-collection-cost-per-£-collected with sibling dataset 03-council-tax-collection; pair with the collection rate from 03, because cheap but poor collection is not efficient.