This breaks down who a council owes money to at the end of a quarter — short-term lenders, long-term lenders, the government's lending body, other councils, and so on. It matters because the mix of lenders affects how risky and expensive the debt is: short-term loans have to be refinanced often, while long-term loans lock in costs. A pile of short-term borrowing can be a warning sign; mostly long-term, stable loans are generally safer.
| name | borrowing_components_q |
|---|---|
| dataset | 02-capital-outturn-debt |
| kind | extracted |
| type | numeric (set of columns) |
| unit | £000 |
| grain | council-quarter |
| role | feature |
| source | Borrowing_and_investment_live_table_Q4_2025_to_2026.ods, sheet LA_Borrowing_25-26_Q4: all 'Loans short term - *', 'Securities - *', 'Loans Longer-term - *', and 'Short/Longer Term Loans Local Authorities' columns (sum for total; no total column exists on the sheet) |
| period | 2025-26 Q4 (quarterly live table) |
| missingness | unknown |
| score_note | Timely lender mix is diagnostic, but raw stock columns scale with council size. |
| peer_group | council class (district / county / unitary / metropolitan / London) — not yet scored on the leaderboard |
The quarterly stock of external borrowing broken down by lender category — short-term loans, securities, longer-term loans, and inter-authority lending. Summing the columns gives total outstanding borrowing (no total column exists on the sheet), timelier than the annual CSV, and the mix itself is diagnostic: heavy reliance on short-term inter-LA loans signals liquidity stress. Denominator of pwlb_dependence; UK-wide table, so filter to England.