For each service, what share of its total cost goes on the council's own staff rather than on things it buys in from outside. It tells you how the council delivers the service: with its own workforce, or through contractors. Neither is automatically cheaper, but if the staff share falls because work was contracted out and the service then costs more overall, the outsourcing deal looks bad.
| name | staff-cost-share-per-service |
|---|---|
| dataset | 01-revenue-outturn |
| kind | constructed |
| type | percentage |
| unit | % of gross service expenditure |
| grain | council-year |
| role | feature |
| source | "Formula: `RO*_..._empl / RO*_..._tot_exp` per RO service line (e.g. ASC `RO3_asctot_empl / RO3_asctot_tot_exp`, waste). Inputs: this dataset's CSV only" |
| 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 | Delivery-model share that can flag bad outsourcing contracts, though cost share alone does not say which model is cheaper. |
| calculated | ../calculated/staff-cost-share-per-service.csv |
| calculated_rows | 23613 |
| calculated_periods | 2017-18 to 2024-25 |
| calculated_date | 2026-08-13 |
| peer_group | council class (district / county / unitary / metropolitan / London) — not yet scored on the leaderboard |
Employee expenditure as a share of a service's total (gross) expenditure — the delivery model, in-house versus outsourced. A shift toward outsourcing plus a rising unit cost flags a bad contract. Remember _empl is staff cost in £000, not headcount, so this is a cost share, not a staffing ratio.