In plain English: every two years the government runs the National Fraud Initiative, cross-checking public-sector records to catch payments that shouldn't have happened — pensions still paid to the dead, fraudulent council-tax discounts, duplicate invoices. This number is the headline result for England: the total pounds of fraud and error detected plus losses estimated to have been prevented in one two-year exercise. It matters as the yardstick for whether the whole scheme pays its way — but it exists only as a national figure; no per-council breakdown is published.
| name | nfi_total_outcomes_england_gbp |
|---|---|
| dataset | 08-national-fraud-initiative |
| kind | extracted |
| type | numeric (GBP) |
| unit | £ per biennial exercise |
| grain | England, per biennial NFI exercise |
| role | national context / benchmark |
| source | NFI biennial report front section and Appendix 2 (data/NFI_report_2022-24.pdf, data/NFI_report_2020-22_dec2022.pdf) |
| period | biennial exercises (e.g. 2020–22, 2022–24) |
| missingness | none at national level; no per-council breakdown exists |
| score_note | Headline England total mixing cash and estimates; context/denominator only. |
| peer_group | council class (district / county / unitary / metropolitan / London) — not yet scored on the leaderboard |
Total NFI outcomes for England per biennial exercise — fraud and overpayments detected plus estimated future losses prevented (£477.5m in 2022–24). It says nothing about any individual council: it is a national-only figure usable solely as context or a denominator for benchmarking. Caveat: the total mixes cash actually detected with modelled estimates of prevention (Appendix 3 methodology), so it is not pure recovered money.