The post you are reporting:
Yes I did find out what the balanced budgets were John - and here is the answer:
Roger,
Thank you for your e-mail. As you will appreciate, we are now in election "purdah", so it is probably appropriate that I provide a very brief reply and refer you to the published budgets.
The full proposed budget is presented to Council in March every year, so that they can approve it and set the Council Tax, and this is on the councils web site, in the March council agenda. Although you have not specified, I assume that you are referring to the General Fund Revenue budget. That is always shown as Annexes 1 and 2 in the budget book provided to Members.
The Council's gross General Fund revenue budget for 2011/12 is :-
Gross Expenditure £69.586m
Gross Income and other adjustments £54.695m
Total budget requirement £14.891m.
Available financing from Revenue Support Grant, Council Tax etc is £14.960m, which means we have a budgeted surplus for 2011/12 of £69k.
Given the scale of the gross expenditure and income, I regard the £69k as being within the margin of error, as it is just 0.1% of the gross expenditure budget, and therefore we have a "balanced budget" by any reasonable definition.
For 2010/11 and 2010/09 the budgets approved by Council in March were £57k deficit and £35k deficit. So I would also regard these budgets as balanced.
You have referred to our level or reserves. I should draw a distinction here between "reserves" and "balances".
Reserves are generally "earmarked" or held for specific purposes. Annex 7 of the budget book shows that we forecast the various General Fund Earmarked Revenue Reserves to total £4.864m at the end of 2011/12.
The General Fund balance is forecast to be £1.794m at the end of 2011/12. This balance is there to cope with unexpected variances and therefore we aim to maintain this above £1.5m in order to provide a prudent buffer.
The outturn reports explain variances against budget and go to Governance in June, so they are also on the web site.
If you have trouble finding them let me know and we can e-mail the links to you.
That's official John, so don't shout about the budgets not being balanced; there is no political bias in the above.
Roger
