This is the council's total spending in a year on long-term projects and purchases — everything from new buildings and roads to buying property and lending for investment purposes. It matters because it is the headline measure of how much the council is investing, and big investment is usually paid for with borrowed money. A high figure means major building or buying activity; a low one means little is being invested.
| name | capex_total |
|---|---|
| dataset | 02-capital-outturn-debt |
| kind | extracted |
| type | numeric |
| unit | £000/yr |
| grain | council-year |
| role | denominator |
| source | Capital_time_series_data_wide_24_03_26.csv, column EandR1_alltot_expgrandtot |
| period | 2018-19 to 2024-25 |
| missingness | unknown |
| score_note | Easy to grasp and universally reported, but a size-driven denominator. |
| peer_group | council class (district / county / unitary / metropolitan / London) — not yet scored on the leaderboard |
Total capital expenditure and other capital transactions across all services in the year. It sizes the council's capital programme and serves as the denominator for receipts_coverage_of_capex and the numerator of capex_to_core_spend. High capex is not itself inefficient — the scoring interest is in how it is financed and what debt it accumulates.