| # | Council | Class | Score | Coverage |
|---|
Each variable is standardized within the council's class — districts against districts, London against London (robust z: distance from the class median in IQR units, clipped at ±3 so extreme outliers like Woking's debt don't distort everyone else) and flipped so that positive always means good (▲ higher is better, ▼ higher is worse). Your dial weights combine them into a weighted mean, squashed through a logistic function to a 0–100 score. 50 ≈ the median council under your weights. Where a class has too few councils reporting a variable for a stable spread, the national scale is used instead. Coverage shows how many of the active variables that council actually has data for; the min-coverage slider hides councils scored on too little. Context variables (population, demand, scale) are excluded — they describe a council's circumstances, not its performance.
A starting profile of what public and press discourse usually means by "council waste", as distinct from demand pressure. It weights heaviest (×2) the back-office share of spend, waste-collection cost per tonne, the share of homeless households parked in B&Bs (the most expensive possible placement), and the slice of the budget consumed by debt servicing — the commercial-gamble signature. Strongly weighted (×1.5) are the growth and scale of debt, nightly-paid housing and cost per TA household, and the cost of collecting council tax. SEND deficits get low weight deliberately: the deficit itself is mostly demand-driven, so only the management-choice slice (reliance on expensive independent placements) carries weight. Reserves discipline sits in between. It is a preset, not a verdict — drag any dial and the ranking is yours.