Do Council's need £10's of millions in reserve?

[PaulAtherton]

Do the figures quoted include in some way the reserves for employee pensions? I would suspect the Torygraph would have linked together as many tenuous sources of money, which may be unusable for whatever reason, that a in councils' names and then just spewed out a headline statistic to hammer home the Telegraph smaller government mantra.

Of course, there'd be more expendable funds for local and national governments if rich arseholes like the Barclay brothers didn't buy private islands to avoid tax.

No this is a cash reserve that is budgeted for every year, from what I can tell from the accounts. Each year the expenditure of the reserve is shown as an expense. Funding for employees pensions is a separate entry and is quite considerable.

In Lambeth's Case - the reserve contribution for 2009/2010 was £3.7 Million, but the back funding for Pensions was £12.8 Million.

 

[PaulAtherton]

IIRC Lambeth are statutorily-obligated to send you a full paper copy of their annual accounts balance sheet if you apply for it.

As usual, can't find bugger-all on their website about it, so it might be worth you phoning North Lambeth Law Centre or the like and asking.

I've found the Lambeth Council Budget Book for 2009/10 which makes for interesting reading (http://tinyurl.com/62pofmc). It would however imply that the reserve is all cash and is accumulated over time. Have you had any workings within the finance department of the council, be good to get a professional's take on this?

 

[PaulAtherton]

That was actually first published in Febuary 2003, just before the Local Government Bill 2002-2003 was passed - Explanatory Notes to the Bill say:

Thanks for that. You seem to be well versed.

So currently, there are no minimum requirements for reserves of local councils, but the secretary of state has the power to impose one should they feel the council are not sufficiently protecting themselves.

Which comes back to my original question, what would prevent Lambeth council for apportioning some of the £93 Million to absorbing some of the cuts to protect front-line services?

There's an interesting article from Public Finance published back in January 2011 on the subject

 

[PaulAtherton]

Just discovered a list of all Councils in the UK their reserves and the proportion of reserves against spending, in The Sun of all places (so making no claims to accuracy).