The council's back-office bill — HR, finance, IT, legal and similar — that hasn't been counted inside individual service budgets. It is part of the cost of running the organisation rather than serving the public. Lower looks leaner, but councils differ in how much of this cost they book inside services instead, so an unusually tiny number usually reflects accounting style rather than a genuinely skeletal back office.
| name | management-and-support-services |
|---|---|
| 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_cennd_mng_spp_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. Sensitive to recharging conventions; near-zero values usually mean costs were recharged to services, not that back-office is free." |
| score_note | Back-office raw line whose level is a recharging artefact; only useful inside the overhead ratio it feeds. |
| peer_group | council class (district / county / unitary / metropolitan / London) — not yet scored on the leaderboard |
Back-office cost (HR, finance, IT etc.) not recharged out to services. Combined with the corporate and democratic core, it forms the numerator of the corporate overhead ratio. Because councils differ in how much they recharge, extreme lows indicate accounting choices rather than efficiency.