In plain English: every two years the government runs the National Fraud Initiative (NFI), cross-checking councils' records against each other to catch payments that should never have happened — pensions still paid to the dead, fraudulent council-tax discounts, duplicate supplier invoices. This number is the cash value of fraud and error actually detected at a council in one of those two-year exercises, as opposed to headline figures that also include estimates of losses prevented. It matters because it is the hard-money part of a council's counter-fraud result. Be aware, though: no publication splits this out per council, so getting it means asking the audit body directly.
| name | nfi_detected_gbp |
|---|---|
| dataset | 08-national-fraud-initiative |
| kind | prospective |
| type | numeric (GBP) |
| unit | £ per biennial exercise |
| grain | council, per biennial NFI exercise |
| role | outcome measure |
| source | not published centrally — route (b) only: FOI/data request to the PSFA (or devolved audit bodies) for the detected component from the NFI web application |
| period | biennial exercises |
| missingness | expected very high — requires the audit body to split detected from estimated, which no publication does per council |
| score_note | Cleanest possible money measure but zero availability anywhere; pure FOI prospect. |
| peer_group | council class (district / county / unitary / metropolitan / London) — not yet scored on the leaderboard |
Actual detected fraud and error value only, excluding the NFI's estimated-future-losses-prevented component. It would be the cleanest per-council money measure, avoiding the actual/estimated mixing that clouds nfi_outcomes_gbp. It is entirely prospective — no per-council figures are published anywhere — and detected value still depends on how vigorously the council investigated its matches.