This is a simple yes/no: has this council ever needed an emergency government bailout to pay its bills? Why care: it is the quickest way to sort councils that have hit serious financial trouble from those that have not. If a council has this flag, at some point since 2020 it could not balance its budget without special government help.
| name | efs_ever |
|---|---|
| dataset | 04-efs-s114 |
| kind | constructed |
| type | boolean |
| unit | boolean |
| grain | council |
| role | feature |
| source | formula: efs_years_count > 0; inputs: efs_years_count (this dataset) |
| period | 2020-21 to 2026-27 |
| missingness | False means no appearance in the published EFS lists for the covered window only; includes withdrawn/conditional rows unless filtered. |
| score_note | Simplest official flag, but trivially efs_years_count > 0. |
| peer_group | council class (district / county / unitary / metropolitan / London) — not yet scored on the leaderboard |
Whether a council has ever appeared on the EFS lists in any covered year — the simplest official distress flag. It captures any brush with the exceptional-support regime, including single-year episodes. Caveat: it counts withdrawn or conditional requests as distress unless efs_withdrawn_or_conditional is used to refine it.