Public Intelligence Limited
Independent advice and intelligence for the public sector
Strategic advice to public sector leaders, and published intelligence on the finances of English local government.
Advisory
Strategic advice and insight
Public Intelligence provides bespoke strategic advice to organisations making a social impact. We build relationships, advise, and manage programmes to deliver results for public, political and private sector clients.
The work is usually light-touch and high-impact: critical friend oversight for major initiatives, independent evaluation where an honest answer matters more than a comfortable one, and practical problem-solving for people working in complex political environments.
Improvement, turnaround and recovery
Supporting leadership teams through performance challenges, crisis management and organisational change.
Place policy and practice
Advising councils on place-based strategy — regeneration, town centres, and making the most of civic assets.
Policy due diligence
Helping private sector organisations understand political and regulatory environments, and align what they offer with what government actually needs.
Organisational learning
Helping organisations adapt — developing knowledge, and supporting recovery after difficulty.
International governmental bodies
Strategic counsel to governmental organisations in Africa, the Middle East and Asia.
Product
Local Intelligence
Financial and governance intelligence on the 152 English principal local authorities — the public record, brought into one place, sourced and attributed throughout.
Local Intelligence is built for two audiences that need the same thing. Authorities and their national bodies, who need tools that help them keep improving and that support necessary challenge and support. And organisations carrying real exposure to local authority finances — audit firms, treasury advisers, pension pools, insurers and lenders — because councils exist in the real financial world, and those who lend to and invest in them reasonably want to know where they stand.
Specialist journalists have free access, on attribution.
Every figure carries its source. Where the record does not support a claim, the product says so rather than filling the gap.
All our claims are based on the best publicly available information we have been able to source. Even official sources are imperfect and fallible, and we say so where we know it. We make every effort to ensure that the data is up to date and accurate. If any data is found to be incorrect we will acknowledge it promptly and correct the site as soon as the correction has been verified, and say what changed.
- 152English principal local authorities in the cohort
- 8years of reserves and outturn history
- 142authorities with PWLB debt maturity profiles
- 331audit opinions read from councils’ own auditors’ reports, across 140 authorities — as at 7 September 2026
Track record
Who we have worked with
Central government, devolved administrations, councils, national bodies and the private organisations that work alongside them.
About
Dr Mike Bennett
Mike founded Public Intelligence in 2011. He also founded Vrac Index, a subscription service providing market intelligence for the bulk wine trade, and co-founded RCS, a research and evaluation consultancy, and the Centre for Partnering, a research collaboration between six UK universities.
He is a Fellow of the School of Social and Political Science at the University of Edinburgh, having previously been a Fellow of the School of Management at the University of St Andrews. His PhD is on the ambiguity of leadership. He has been a senior adviser to a range of businesses, including Newton Impact, Global Counsel and Cornerstone Assets.
Earlier in his career he was a Director of the Society of Local Authority Chief Executives (SOLACE), having begun his career at the Scottish Local Authorities Management Centre at Strathclyde Business School.
Contact
Get in touch
For advisory work, or for early access to Local Intelligence.