This is the council's total debt at the end of the year — the overall amount it still needs to pay off for all the building and buying it has done over time, whether or not it has actually taken out loans yet. It matters because it is the best single measure of how indebted a council is. A high and rising figure means the council owes a lot and will spend more of its budget on repayments for years; a low figure means it is lightly indebted.
| name | cfr_end |
|---|---|
| dataset | 02-capital-outturn-debt |
| kind | extracted |
| type | numeric |
| unit | £000 |
| grain | council-year |
| role | feature |
| source | Capital_time_series_data_wide_24_03_26.csv, column PRU1_prucfrend_amt |
| period | 2018-19 to 2024-25 |
| missingness | unknown |
| score_note | Canonical debt stock but jargon-heavy and scales with council size. |
| peer_group | council class (district / county / unitary / metropolitan / London) — not yet scored on the leaderboard |
Capital Financing Requirement at 31 March — the council's underlying need to borrow for capital purposes, the canonical measure of accumulated capital debt. For efficiency scoring it is the core debt-stock input: a large CFR relative to the council's operating size flags leverage built up through capital or commercial-investment strategies. Use the non-HRA _amt column (an _amthra variant exists) so housing landlord debt is not mixed with general-fund debt; filter to council classes (LA_Class in UA/SC/SD/L/MD).