Parallax · Local government finance

Know when the money runs out. Know what can change it.

A financial intelligence portal covering 151 upper-tier English councils. Reserves projections, benchmark analysis, supplier intelligence, and social care data — built on open public data, with the structural factors held constant.

What was previously not possible

Published council finance data exists. What has not existed is a single analytical environment that joins reserves, overhead, social care, health outcomes, funding, and supplier data — strips out what circumstance explains — and lets you model what happens next.

Parallax Local Government Finance is that environment. It covers finance, social services, and supplier intelligence across all 151 upper-tier English authorities. Every surface runs on the same engine: expected versus actual, structural versus controllable, honest about what the data cannot resolve.

One evidence base. Six ways in.

Explorer

Every council, every metric. Filter by region, type, and peer group. Starting point for any authority-specific question.

Profile

Full analytical profile for one authority. Expected versus actual across reserves, overhead, health outcomes, and funding. Structural share and controllable residual shown separately.

Benchmark

Each point is a council. The diagonal is the match line. Points above it are outperforming their circumstances. The watchlist ranks the furthest below expectation.

Simulate

Driver-based projection of usable reserves to 2035. Set the breach year. Adjust levers — overhead reduction, care efficiency, capital financing — bounded to what is realistic. The target operating model shows the gap to the leanest quartile of genuine peers.

Health and social care

Health outcome data joined to the finance base. Falls admissions, cancer diagnosis, diabetes prevalence tested against care spend. Results are reported honestly: the current dataset returns well-powered nulls on care-spend-to-outcome links. The confounding traps are named, not published as findings.

Funding

Funding settlement against need. Identifies authorities receiving materially more or less than their circumstances predict.

Which suppliers are winning. And whether that should concern you.

Parallax tracks contract awards across the upper-tier council landscape. The supplier intelligence layer shows which suppliers are growing their footprint, which are concentrating in specific authority types, and where award patterns diverge from performance records. For suppliers with significant presence, the platform supports deep-dive risk analysis: contract concentration, authority dependency, and performance signals from published data.