This records the exact dates a council declared effective bankruptcy, plus notes on what went wrong (bad investments, equal-pay bills, and so on). Why care: the dates show when the crisis hit and how long the council has been dealing with it, and the notes tell the human story behind the numbers. If a council appears here, there was a specific day when its finance officer publicly said the money had run out.
| name | s114_dates / s114_first_date |
|---|---|
| dataset | 04-efs-s114 |
| kind | extracted |
| type | date(s) |
| unit | ISO date(s) |
| grain | council (list of notice dates; first date scalar) |
| role | feature |
| source | data/s114-notices-compiled.csv: `notice_date` column (ISO dates); `section` is s114(3) throughout; `notes` gives the reported cause |
| period | 2018-02-02 to 2023-11-29 (coverage after Nov 2023 unconfirmed) |
| missingness | unknown — hand-compiled, unofficial list; absence of an s114 record is not evidence of absence. |
| score_note | Timing and causes add qualitative value, but hand-compiled coverage ends Nov 2023. |
| peer_group | council class (district / county / unitary / metropolitan / London) — not yet scored on the leaderboard |
The date(s) on which a council declared it could not balance its budget, with s114_first_date marking when distress was first declared. The accompanying notes field records the reported cause (equal pay liabilities, investment losses, etc.), useful for qualitative context. Caveat: dates only cover the 2018-2023 hand-compiled window.