Everything the council spends on running itself rather than serving the public directly — finance, HR, IT, collecting local taxes, elections, registering births and deaths. It matters because this is the organisation's own running cost, the part residents never see. Bigger councils naturally spend more here, so the useful question is whether it is out of line with similar councils, not the raw size.
| name | total-central-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_centot_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 | Broader overhead raw line; near-duplicate of its own ratio and of the corporate core lines it aggregates. |
| peer_group | council class (district / county / unitary / metropolitan / London) — not yet scored on the leaderboard |
All central functions, including local tax collection and registration services. It is the broader overhead measure and is more robust to recharge-line choices than the corporate core alone, which is why the central services ratio is the safer overhead comparator.