This is a simple ranking of how deep in financial trouble each council is, combining the two official warning signs: declaring effective bankruptcy and taking government bailouts. Why care: it lets you compare councils at a glance — a higher score means more, and more serious, distress events. If a council scores high here, it has repeatedly hit the point where it could not pay its own way.
| name | distress_severity_score |
|---|---|
| dataset | 04-efs-s114 |
| kind | constructed |
| type | ordinal |
| unit | ordinal score |
| grain | council |
| role | outcome |
| source | formula: e.g. 2*s114_count + efs_years_count (ordinal, tunable); inputs: s114_count, efs_years_count (this dataset) |
| period | 2018-2026 union of components' windows |
| missingness | unknown for the s114 component — hand-compiled list, absence not evidence of absence; scores may understate councils with unrecorded notices. |
| score_note | Composite outcome with tunable, non-canonical weights on an undercounted s114 base. |
| peer_group | council class (district / county / unitary / metropolitan / London) — not yet scored on the leaderboard |
An ordinal ranking of councils by breadth of formal distress, weighting s114 notices above EFS years because a s114 is the harder signal. The weighting is explicitly tunable, not canonical. Caveats: it inherits the unofficial s114 list's undercounting risk and counts withdrawn/conditional EFS years unless filtered.