In plain English: every two years the government's National Fraud Initiative cross-checks councils' records and hands each council a list of suspicious "matches" — possible fraudulent discounts, pensions paid to the dead, duplicate payments. This number is the share of that list the council actually worked through and closed. It matters because a match only stops fraud if someone investigates it: a low rate means warnings sat unexamined. No per-council figures are published centrally, so both ingredients must be collected the hard way from committee papers or audit-body requests.
| name | nfi_investigation_rate |
|---|---|
| dataset | 08-national-fraud-initiative |
| kind | prospective |
| type | numeric (ratio) |
| unit | proportion (0–1) per biennial exercise |
| grain | council, per biennial NFI exercise |
| role | derived effort metric |
| source | derived — nfi_matches_closed / nfi_matches_total; both inputs require bespoke collection (committee papers or PSFA/audit-body web-application extract) |
| period | biennial exercises |
| missingness | inherits the high missingness of its inputs, especially closed-status counts |
| score_note | Good engagement proxy, but closed-status ambiguity and derived-input missingness cap it. |
| peer_group | council class (district / county / unitary / metropolitan / London) — not yet scored on the leaderboard |
The share of released matches a council closed during an exercise — a measure of how seriously it engaged with its NFI workload. It would distinguish councils with low outcomes because of low fraud from those that simply did not investigate. No per-council inputs are centrally published, and closing a match is not the same as genuinely investigating it, so the rate can overstate effort.