In plain English: every two years the government's National Fraud Initiative cross-checks public-sector records to catch payments that shouldn't have happened — but finding an overpayment is not the same as getting the money back. This number is the share of detected overpayments actually recovered, published nationally in the NFI reports. It matters because a low recovery rate means fraud was found but the cash stayed lost. Note: this exists only at national level — no per-council breakdown is published anywhere.
| name | nfi_recovery_rate_pct |
|---|---|
| dataset | 08-national-fraud-initiative |
| kind | extracted |
| type | numeric (percentage) |
| unit | % of detected overpayments recovered |
| grain | national, per biennial NFI exercise |
| role | national context / benchmark |
| source | recovery-rates page of the NFI biennial reports |
| period | biennial exercises |
| missingness | none at national level; no per-council breakdown exists |
| score_note | National-only clawback benchmark; simple to read but no council signal. |
| peer_group | council class (district / county / unitary / metropolitan / London) — not yet scored on the leaderboard |
The split of detected overpayments between recovered and not-recovered, expressed nationally per exercise. It gives a benchmark for how much detected loss is typically clawed back, but says nothing about any individual council's recovery performance. Caveat: national-only, and recovery lags detection so figures for recent exercises are provisional.