This is the size of the emergency financial lifeline the government agreed to give a council in a particular year — essentially, how big the bailout was. Why care: the bigger the number, the bigger the hole in the council's finances. If a council has a large figure here, it could not cover its bills that year without special government permission to borrow or sell assets.
| name | efs_amount_in_year |
|---|---|
| dataset | 04-efs-s114 |
| kind | extracted |
| type | numeric |
| unit | £ million per council-year |
| grain | council-year |
| role | feature |
| source | data/efs-<year>.csv / data/efs-all-years.csv: amount regex-parsed from `col2` (`£X.Xm` pattern; take the latest figure when a `(from £Y ...)` revision note is present) |
| period | 2020-21 to 2026-27 |
| missingness | Some rows have no parseable £ figure (withdrawn or conditional support) — these are genuinely non-numeric, not missing data; amounts are 'agreed in principle' and revised retroactively on GOV.UK, so re-fetch before final analysis. |
| score_note | Official amounts but regex-parsed and retroactively revised; strong severity outcome. |
| peer_group | council class (district / county / unitary / metropolitan / London) — not yet scored on the leaderboard |
The size of capitalisation support agreed in principle for a council in a year, parsed from free-text amounts. Larger figures indicate deeper reliance on exceptional support. Caveats: amounts are agreed in principle and not necessarily drawn down; some entries are HRA support or withdrawn requests — the free text in col2 says which; revision notes must be resolved to the latest figure.