About this map
The financial position of every English local authority, mapped — reserves, debt, spending pressure, and how close each council is to the point where it cannot balance its budget.
Local authorities publish a great deal about their finances, in statutory returns and statements of accounts that run to hundreds of pages each. Very little of it is comparable at a glance, and almost none of it is geographic. CouncilWatch pulls the figures that actually predict distress into one view so you can see patterns across regions and authority types rather than reading one council at a time.
Using the map
- Filter by authority type first. County, district, unitary, metropolitan district and London borough councils deliver different services with different cost bases. Comparing across types produces nonsense; comparing within a type is meaningful.
- Shade by the metric you care about — the composite risk score, reserves as a share of revenue, debt gearing, or the share of budget consumed by statutory demand.
- Click an authority for the underlying figures and the reporting year they come from. Always check the year: audit delays mean some councils' most recent published accounts are several years old.
- Look for clusters. The interesting signal is rarely one council. It is a region where several authorities share the same pressure.
What the risk bands mean
The Municipal Insolvency Risk Score is our own composite, built from four published indicators: usable reserves as a share of net revenue expenditure, external debt relative to revenue, the share of budget consumed by adult social care, children's services and homelessness, and whether the balanced budget depends on one-off measures such as capital receipts or reserve drawdowns.
| Band | Score | What it indicates |
|---|---|---|
| Stable | Under 40 | Reserves and debt in normal range, no reliance on one-off measures. |
| Vulnerable | 40–59 | One indicator materially out of line; little capacity to absorb a shock. |
| Severe risk | 60–79 | Several indicators stressed; typically drawing on reserves to balance. |
| Critical distress | 80+ | Pattern resembling authorities that later sought exceptional support. |
Two caveats matter. The score is not an official statistic and carries no standing with any government department — it is our reading of published data. And it is not a prediction: a high score means an authority resembles others that have struggled, and several such councils have since recovered through asset sales, restructuring or improved settlements.
What a Section 114 notice actually is
Councils cannot go bankrupt in the corporate sense. What happens instead is that the authority's chief finance officer issues a report under Section 114 of the Local Government Finance Act 1988, stating that spending is likely to exceed available resources. New non-essential spending stops immediately and the full council must meet within 21 days to agree an emergency budget. Statutory services continue throughout.
The map flags authorities under active Section 114 notices, capitalisation directions and statutory intervention, because those are the outcomes the risk score is trying to anticipate.
Where the data comes from
Revenue outturn and budget returns submitted to the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, authorities' own statements of accounts, and public records of Section 114 notices and statutory interventions. Boundary geometry contains Ordnance Survey data © Crown copyright and database right, under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
CouncilWatch is independent and not affiliated with any council or government department. Corrections are welcome — get in touch if a figure looks wrong.
Read more
Our full guide explains the four warning signals in detail, the recognisable patterns behind recent council failures, and how to read the score without over-reading it.