This shows how big a council's total emergency bailouts are compared with what it spends in a normal year. Why care: a council that has needed bailouts worth a large slice of its annual budget is not just having a bad year — it is living on borrowed money. If a council scores high here, its day-to-day services increasingly depend on repeated government rescues rather than its own income.
| name | cumulative_efs_share_of_spend |
|---|---|
| dataset | 04-efs-s114 |
| kind | constructed |
| type | numeric |
| unit | ratio (%) |
| grain | council |
| role | feature |
| source | formula: efs_cumulative_amount / net_revenue_expenditure (latest year); inputs: efs_cumulative_amount (this dataset) + revenue expenditure from sibling dataset 01-revenue-outturn (RSX/RS outturn by LA); join by council name |
| period | 2020-21 to 2026-27 numerator over latest-year denominator |
| missingness | Undefined where the name join to outturn data fails; numerator subject to GOV.UK revisions and the Birmingham 2026-27 restatement exclusion. |
| score_note | Near-duplicate of efs_share_of_revenue_spend with a mismatched multi-year/single-year window. |
| peer_group | council class (district / county / unitary / metropolitan / London) — not yet scored on the leaderboard |
Measures the depth of a council's accumulated dependence on exceptional support relative to its current annual spending. A large cumulative share marks councils whose viability now rests on repeated bailouts. Caveats: mixes a multi-year numerator with a single-year denominator, and depends on free-text name matching to the outturn dataset.