Local government revenue expenditure and financing 2018-2019: provisional outturn and budget estimates

Introduction

This Statistics Publication provides details of the provisional cost of Scottish local authority services for 2018-19 and the budgeted cost of those services for 2019-20.

The information in this publication is collected via the Provisional Outturn and Budget Estimates (POBE) return with the help of the 32 local authorities. The continued co-operation of these bodies in completing these returns is gratefully acknowledged.

The POBE form and additional information sheets are sent to all local authorities annually to complete a breakdown by service and sub-service of their provisional outturn expenditure for the current year and their budget estimates for the forthcoming year.

Local government expenditure is split between revenue and capital expenditure. This publication covers revenue expenditure only. Revenue expenditure is largely made up of employee and operating costs.

All figures provided in the POBE return and reported in this publication relate to net revenue expenditure. Net revenue expenditure is the gross revenue expenditure^[1] less any specific income for individual services. It can therefore be considered as the expenditure to be financed from Scottish Government Grants, Non-Domestic Rates (NDR) income, Council Tax income and local authority reserves.

Net revenue expenditure is influenced by the value of any income attributable to an individual service. For example, a local authority will provide planning and building control services for which they will charge fees. The net revenue expenditure will be the residual cost of providing those services less any income from fees charged.

The commentary within this publication focuses on high-level Scotland figures only. An excel file containing local authority level figures and the workbook containing the local authority source data from the return will be available at www2.gov.scot/Topics/Statistics/Browse/Local-Government-Finance/POBEStats.