At the end of January there were several posts about "missing millions in Somerset". A recent press release from a campaigning group in Somerset was also recently posted here [see "Makes you think?" - posted on 15th Feb]. As promised, this post attempts to describe our follow up to that, now that Somerset’s full Council has met and agreed the budget reductions.
There's been some understandable interest in the amount which services are allocating between frontline and back office and that has been the case in Somerset as much as anywhere else. Local government budgets are arranged in such a way that it means we needed to do further analysis to allocate costs between these two categories and we've worked on that over the last few days. We recognise, however, that it will be unlikely that the calculations which we've used for these categories will be readily comparable to all authorities or even accepted in all respects by interested parties. Quite apart from anything else, this updates information we took to public consultation last Autumn.
So, for the record, in Somerset the Libraries Service manages a gross revenue budget of £6.5m (2010/11, estimate). Of that sum, approximately £4.9m, or around three-quarters, is spent on front-line service delivery and £1.6m on other costs. The service has an annual income of £1.1m, resulting in a net revenue budget of about £5.4m.
For standard accounting purposes, real and notional central costs have to be attributed to front-line services. £1.4m is currently attributed to the Library Service as its share of these central Council ‘overheads’ including the HR and Payroll service, IT infrastructure etc. These budgets are not managed by the Library Service or available for the service to make savings on, but they will be subject to their own share of service cuts.
In Somerset, we’re more used to comments about the level of spending being towards the low rather than the high end. So, this debate has been something of a novelty for us, given our position as 173rd out of 198 UK library authorities for total revenue expenditure on libraries per 1,000 population (CIPFA Public Library Statistics : Actuals, 2009/10).
We felt it would be helpful to make this information public given the previous discussion.
Phil Nichols
Libraries & Information Manager : Somerset County Council
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