Nottingham City Council

Nottingham City Council issued its third section 114 notice in March 2026, formally declaring it could not balance its budget for the year . The notice arrived as one of 36 English councils that the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government agreed to place on Exceptional Financial Support in principle for 2026-27, worth roughly £1.74bn in total, up from 18 councils two years earlier .

Nottingham City Council is the local authority responsible for services in the city of Nottingham, distinct from the place itself: the council is the governing body, while Nottingham is the city it administers. The council issued its first section 114 notice in 2023, driven by rising adult social care costs and losses at its Robin Hood Energy municipal energy company, and has operated under central government oversight since.

A third section 114 notice from the same authority signals that the underlying financial pressures behind the 2023 notice were not resolved by the recovery measures that followed. Nottingham's repeated recourse to section 114 has made it, alongside Birmingham and Thurrock, a recurring reference point in the wider debate over whether English local government finance is structurally underfunded rather than simply mismanaged in a handful of councils.