QUOTE (Exhausted @ Mar 16 2014, 06:49 PM)
I have to agree with you on the admin costings according to the leaflet on the precept.
Administration at 10.26%
Accounts staff costs at 5.83%
Council & support staff costs at 4.9%
Civic duties at 6.05%
and
Direct committee expenditure at 1.88%
This works out at 28.92% in administration costs
With an income figure of precept income plus their figure for "total income" at £1,112,171, this is a real cost of £321,640 for admin.
This does not include the cost of running the Town Hall at 9.12% £101,430
Can this be right. When it is seen as real cost in pound notes, then it doesn't look too good.
This is more than we spend on our parks and open spaces £313,000
It seems to me that the Christmas lights will cost us £26,500 as well.
The market £10,500 and the allotments £50,700
I've argued previously for Civic Duties to be treated as as administration overhead but I'm not doing that myself any more as I think Civic Duties is properly seen as a service, albeit a service that doesn't serve the public very well. I do though definitely include Town Hall as an administrative overhead because I know it has some prestige value but it is essentially just office accommodation and should be compared with the cost of other office accommodation available in and around the town.
The council haven't previously broken their administration costs down into Administration, Accounts staff costs, and Council & support staff costs, and have previously lumped those all together under Administration in the precept leaflet, so I keep them together under Admin so this year remains directly comparable with previous years.
So by my reckoning administration is Administration, Accounts staff costs, Council & support staff costs, Town Hall, Newbury Youth Council, and Election Expenses.
I include the last two because they are both part of the machinery of the council's operation.
The Committee head is a catch-all slush fund for councillors to spend on pet projects. It is accounted for quite differently in the Income and Expenditure account and you have to take out a bunch of stuff like all the various things that are accounted for in the precept leaflet as grants, as well as the NYP, Neighbourhood Wardens, WBC Toilets, and maybe some other stuff too, I forget. It's not admin as far as I can tell, it's just not very worthy service spending.
You need to work out the net service cost rather than the turnover, so don't include the revenue. If you the lump in the revenue you effectively apportion it across the services by expenditure, but a service's revenue is applied entirely to its own service. Once you have the net service cost you can add the service revenue to get the service turnover.
But yes, £296,398 for back-office administration (so accounts, reception desk, office accommodation, phones and photocopiers, etc) from a precept of around £950,000 is lousy.