This flags whether a council asked the government for emergency permission to borrow just to pay its bills in a given year — a bailout in all but name. Why care: councils are legally required to balance their budgets, so needing this support means normal finances have failed. If a council has this flag, it was officially in financial distress that year.
| name | efs_awarded_in_year |
|---|---|
| dataset | 04-efs-s114 |
| kind | extracted |
| type | boolean |
| unit | boolean per council-year |
| grain | council-year |
| role | feature |
| source | data/efs-<year>.csv (or data/efs-all-years.csv filtered on `year`): council in `col1`, presence of a non-header row (drop rows where col1 = 'Local authority'; respect table_index rules — table 2 in efs-2026-27.csv is not per-council) |
| period | 2020-21 to 2026-27 |
| missingness | Councils not listed simply received no EFS that year; but note the header rows and the non-per-council 2026-27 table 2 must be excluded before treating presence as an award. |
| score_note | Official GOV.UK distress flag, clean binary, the dataset's core signal. |
| peer_group | council class (district / county / unitary / metropolitan / London) — not yet scored on the leaderboard |
Flags whether a council was granted (or requested) Exceptional Financial Support in a given financial year. It is an official distress signal — a bailout in all but name — published by government. Caveat: some listed rows are withdrawn or in-principle-only requests (e.g. Bexley 2020-21), so presence does not always mean support was taken; and 2025-26 includes one non-council row (South Yorkshire MCA police functions).