My understanding is that the figures mentioned in this post are a total
revision of the previous figures published by SCC, yet we have seen no
justification of them. SCC are now claiming to spend more on their front
line services than they did previously. We now have three sets of figures,
the original published set of figures in the consultation document, the
revised ones on Phil Nicols post today and the figures from our advisor Tim
Coates analysis of Somerset County Councils Budget book. Only a detailed
justification of the figures line by line will show what the true figures
are. The fact that the computer costs on the libraries budget are £640,400
and the book budget is £202,800 speaks for itself.
The agreed meeting between FOGL, Tim Coates, Officers and most importantly
Cabinet members is imperative now that the original figures produced by
officers have been shown to be incorrect and a line by line justification of
the book budget is the only way to clarify the figures. Further posts and
debate are irrevelant until that meeting where base line figures can be
agreed.
-----Original Message-----
From: Phil Nichols
Sent: Thursday, February 17, 2011 7:37 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Makes you think and missing millions - Somerset's budget
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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