Back at the end of last year, I had a quick look through Bristol's proposed budget for 2008/09.

These were the main figures for the proposed budget, and this year's increase in the authority's precept of the council tax (4.85%) was calculated from that figure. These were the headline figures (Click here if you're a feed subscriber):

Now, finally, the Budget Book for 2008/2009 is available. And the figures are dramatically different:

Now if you look at the final line, you'll see that the amount of money required in Council Tax is unchanged. But, the actual revenue budget of the council has increased by 7.8% from £327,865,000 to £353,128,000

You may be wondering how it's possible that the council had decided it needs an extra £25 million quid and yet has decided not to raise council tax. Well that's easy. It's a six stage process:

1. Flog off the family silver (£9.6 million)
2. Spend anything leftover from last year (£3.6m on the pie charts, £2.6m on the spreadsheets)
3. Check down the back of the sofa for any loose change (£13 grand)
4. Borrow from the bank
5. Cut your contingency budget and hope nothing goes wrong (£1.2 million)
6. Get London to bail you out with grants (paid for by central taxation and central borrowing)

More research is needed to understand the grant funding changes, but there's one thing that really stands out: every single council department increased their requirements between the Draft proposals in December and the final Budget. Every single one. Putting aside all the financial jiggery-pokery, £49 million was added to the budget between December and May. The Chief Executive's department alone increased the proposed spend by practically 50% from £14m to £20m.

More to follow, but for the moment consider this. Every single Bristolian - man, woman and child - now has a debt hanging around their neck of £964.40 due to local authority borrowing.

Budgeting, as I have discussed previously, is about making decisions; decisions about what constitute your priorities. Food or Heating? Deposit on a car, or a holiday? Health or Education? As individuals, we make trade-offs between different ways of using our money (today, mine was fixing the car or tiling the bathroom. The former won.)

Government - national and local - must also define their priorities, and let's not forget that they are also making decisions about spending our money. But while elected officials are quick to say something is a priority, they are less keen on the obligatory action to balance the books: saying something is not a priority.

A quick unscientific example? Compare Google Search results for the following phrases:

• Politics "This is a Priority": ~17,000 results
• Politics "This is not a Priority": ~ 400 results

The 3 Year Plan (a paltry 0.6 on the Stalinometer)

At last week's Cabinet meeting, one of the items under discussion was the Corporate Plan 2008-11, which I mentioned a couple of weeks ago. This document again quotes the "Our City" philosophy of the current city leadership:

The four Our City themes are priorities that will guide all our activity

• Our City: Ambitious Together – going for growth that all can contribute to and benefit from.
• Our City: Making a Difference – achieving lasting improvements in the key services we provide that are not currently up to standard.
• Our City: Safer and Healthier – ensuring thawt citizens feel safe from crime and anti-social behaviour and can enjoy a healthy lifestyle.
• Our City: Better Neighbourhoods – ensuring that Bristol residents experience significant change in the physical quality of their neighbourhoods and have opportunities to shape improvements at this level.

I'm busy working on another round of investigations into the Redland Green School Overspend, so I'm not going to go through this mushy document (at minimum a Type 5 on the Bristol Scale) in great detail, but I will highlight one section:

2.1 A REGIONAL CAPITAL
To deliver our vision for Bristol as an ambitious international city we need to maintain and build the opportunities for investment and economic growth, working with all sectors to achieve a dynamic economy that creates and sustains jobs for Bristol residents. We need to encourage growing business sectors, such as creative industries, environmental technologies and financial services. The creative industries sector, is one of the fastest growing in the region’s economy. It is worth £1 billion in the south west of England and employs 5% of the region’s workforce. In Bristol, the sector employs 3.7% of the workforce and generates a turnover in excess of £360 million.

Note the emphasis on creative industries, which employ a massive "3.7% 5% of the region's workforce". They need "encouragement", it says. What does that mean? If you were to ask me how to encourage any industry, I'd say you should keep regulation to a minimum, set taxation low and - as a politician - generally just keep out of the way. I wonder if that's what the council means by "encourage"?

Percentages are a great way to obfuscate reality, so I always prefer to dig out the absolute numbers. If we have a look at regional statistics clearing house Intelligence West, a few calculation on the dataset Unemployment Rate suggests that the total West of England regional workforce figure from which this percentage is derived is around 503,000 people. So the total regional "creative" workforce is around 18,600 25,100 people.

For comparison, (using the Major Employers Dataset) the four local authorities employ 38,500 people (Bristol City Council alone employs 16,500 people). The total public sector employment in the area is around 75,000 versus around 111,000 employed by the largest private employers.

Which all tells us that over 63% of people in the area(l) work in small business (the uncreative sector?) I think this tells us that we don't need to "encourage" any particular bit of the economy, other than by the measures I offered above: by minimising regulation and keeping tax low. And if we're not doing so much encouraging, perhaps we won't need to spend so much on councillors' allowances and officers' wages.

In previous posts, I have discussed the process by which local government obtains and spends your money. And recently, we saw a master class in accounting finesse at the Cabinet meeting, in which dodgy savings were exploited to fill the gaps in ongoing commitments with a flourish worthy of a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat.

Well, in today's Evening Post you can read about how Budgeting is supposed to be done; specifically by defining your priorities are and cutting back on non-essentials. I've previously suggested that spending another £250,000 on Abolition 201-and-counting is largely pointless, and suggesting my own preferred approach to redistributing the savings (summary: give it back to Council tax payers).

But I'm happy to endorse the local Conservative Group's alternate approach [Notice of Interest: I'm a Conservative, with a big C. Comments open for snarky rejoinders]. Unfortunately Bristol & South Gloucestershire Conservatives are having problems updating the main website, hence the lack of official notices, but here's some of my unofficial commentary.

We have a problem with the "Third Sector" in Britain, in that it has become more and more dependent on the state for funding. One can understand why charitable giving is down, with 40% of British wages being taken in tax, but the net effect has been a vicious cycle in which voluntary organisations - starved of voluntary funding - become vassals of government. On a positive note, the largest private charitable foundation in the world, the Rotary Foundation, still maintains its independence.

The long term goal for anyone with a bit of common sense must be to restore independence to charities which can only come through cutting off state funding (see the Burning Our Money blog for more analysis). But doing it all in one go - attractive as that might seem to the radical - leaves a lot of well-meaning people in the lurch. We've seen the outcome of the "Cold Turkey" effect recently in Bristol with the winding down of local Third-sector welfare from two large grant-giving central funds - the Neighbourhood Fund and the Working Neighbourhoods Fund, both in control of Whitehall. (ref: Keren Suchecki, correspondent of the mysterious Bristol Blogger).

The Conservative proposal is that instead of spending the two hundred and fifty large in the Abolition fund on... well your guess is as good as mine, that it be spent as follows:

• St Paul's Young People - £75,000.
• Northern Crescent Diversionary Activities - £45,000, including Southmead Summer Fun, BS7 Youth and Play Partnership and Lawrence Weston activities for young people.
• Education Inclusion Fund - £40,000 for initiatives in Hartcliffe and Withywood.
• Dhek Bhal - £20,000 for respite and care services.
• HAWKS Family Service - £13,000, to cut drug and alcohol abuse among young people in deprived parts of south Bristol as well as raising attainment.
• Choosing Health - £10,000, to help stroke sufferers in the Southmead area.
• Lawrence Weston Tuition Project - £4,000 to raise young people's attainment in Lawrence Weston.
• Southmead Contact & Resource Team (SCART) - £3,000.

Most of these organisations have found themselves in short term difficulty due to the grant changes. I will say I'm slightly sceptical of the real benefits delivered by a couple of these line items, but I'm trusting my colleagues in Council to have picked out the best performers. Want more of the same? Then come along to a Conservative event in your area and get involved.

(See Nick Webb's Blog for further analysis)

Update: I've just noticed we're having problems with the events page at Bristol & South Gloucestershire Conservatives, so here's a listing of some upcoming attractions:

I would particularly draw your attention to Curry Night on March 11th, where you can sample the Gujarati cuisine of local restaurant and take-away Tiffins.

Conservative Events: February and March 2008

Sat Feb 16 Quiz • Brislington East • 7.30pm • 5Westfield
Park • £7 to include hot supper • Jenny
Rogers 01275 833287.

Mon Feb 18 Stoke Bishop Tea Club • Stoke Bishop
Village Hall • Guest Speaker: Mr Mike Brayley
• Noreen Billingham 0117 9682796.

Mon Feb 25 European Hustings • Come and meet
Candidates for the European Elections in
2009 (a B&SG event withThornbury &Yate
Conservatives, North East Somerset and
Bath) • 5Westfield Park • 7.30pm • Entry £5
for light buffet • Cash Bar • For further details
contact Sue Bristowe 0117 9736811.
March

Mon March 3 Supper Club • 5Westfield Park • 7.30pm
for 8.00pm • £10 • Lesley Alexander 0117
9651935.

Wed March 5 Coffee Morning • Stoke Bishop • 10.30am •
Flat 6 Rockleaze Court, Rockleaze Avenue •
£2 • Margaret Pearce 0117 9686438.

Tues March 11 Curry Night! • Conservative Future •
7.30pm • 5Westfield Park • An evening of
fantastic food fromTiffins, a unique Indian
takeaway in Kingsdown with a menu
offering authentic Gujarati cooking, famed
throughout India for its healthy qualities and
wide range of vegetarian and vegan dishes •
Tickets £10 • Sue Bristowe 0117 9736811.
Fri 14

Conservative Party Spring Forum •
Newcastle/Gateshead •This mini-Conference
is open to all members to attend. Please
contact 0117 9736811 for further details.
Sat 15

Easter Market • Cotham • 10.30am • 5
Westfield Park • £2 • Cynthia Fleming 0117
9736387.

Last night's city cabinet meeting was one of the best attended in recent history, with a list of 177 statements from the public - enough to fill half a ream of A4.

The two largest contingents represented the Dhek Bhal care project in Barton Hill (website still under construction) and users of Bristol's Adult Learning Service (Night School, for my one American reader). The Marksbury Road Library is also getting a reprieve.

Dhek Bhal is one of those interesting voluntary groups that has almost no public profile, and yet provides an invaluable service to its niche customers. Their business is the provision of care to elderly people from the Sikh, Hindu & Muslim population of Bristol, in particular those for whom English is a second language. The organisation has been caught short by recent changes in the disbursement of public funds - they didn't jump through the correct bureaucratic hoops, and the absence of the correctly completed forms in triplicate means no cash.

Ideologically, I'm keen for services like this to operate outside the funding sphere - and thus the control - of government. But with 40% or Britain's income going to the state, it's understandable that people don't have much left for charity. Dhek Bhal now have a difficult deadline to meet: they have to get their funding request into the council before the Budget meeting on February 28th.

It was a better night for Adult Learning, as the required £160,000 (0.81 pence for every Bristolian tax payer), has been found by a bit of financial jiggery pokery described in council papers as

"Delete provision for VAT changes, in the light of the latest proposals from HMRC"

I've got no idea what this means, but kudos to John Goulandris and others for applying pressure in the right place. (But see below)

Again, ideologically, I think Adult learning - indeed, all education - would be more effective if the state got out of the business of service provision. Adult learning would be a good place to trial a system analogous to school vouchers, in which government funds education from general taxation, but leaves provision to the private sector. Get it right there, and perhaps we could use the same process to create some genuine change in Bristol's Schools.

One particular item of paperwork that hasn't made it to the website yet was the pink sheet entitled "Revenue budget 2008/09 - General Fund" handed out on the day. Here's the content:

--- S:\Reports\2007-08\Executives 2007-2008\Cabinet\reports\10-04Feb08\final reports\revenue budget amendment.odt ---

The Cabinet thanks the many individuals and organisations who have responded to the draft budget proposals published in December. With some specific exceptions, there has been broad support for the proposals which, taken in conjunction with the capital programmes and bids for further funding, will deliver significant improvements in our priorities of:

• Our city: ambitious together
• Our city: making a difference
• Our city: safer and healthier
• Our city: better neighbourhoods

In the medium term, there will be spending pressures above the rate of inflation in areas such as waste disposal (increasing landfill tax) and social care (demographic growth). To provide for this and to create headroom for further investment in corporate plan priorities, officers have been asked to prepare departmental plans for efficiency savings for 2009-2011 averaging approximately 1.5% p.a. net (£9m over two years) and , with KPMG, for additional savings from the Business Transformation Programme (£10m over two years).

--- S:\Reports\2007-08\Executives 2007-2008\Cabinet\reports\10-04Feb08\final reports\revenue budget amendment.odt END ---

As the designated kill-joy for the day, it's up to me to point out that the savings listed above are the product of accounting finesse rather than actual budgeting.

• 400k from a revised contingency means next year we're likely to have an "unexpected" overspend due to lack of contingency funds.
• 90k from one-off resources brought forward means a future one-off extra resources required.
• A revised estimate today means a future "unplanned" rise in costs tomorrow.
• I've already commented on the VAT item - still no idea what this actually means.

Budgeting means deciding on your priorities, and spending money accordingly. It means making decisions about the relative importance of different ways of spending your money. As individuals, by and large we successfully manage to make rational decisions about when to buy food and when to buy an Xbox 360; when to pay the rent and when to go on holiday; when to use our savings and when to use our credit cards.

To the extent that government can budget sensibly, it's simply impossible if the leadership cannot express its priorities. One wonders whether the team from KPMG and the Business Transformation Programme suggested a bit more work on goal-setting by the City Cabinet, as in the absence of some sensible goals the money spent on said consultants is completely wasted. To remind you, our city's priorities, in no particular order, are:

• ambitious together
• making a difference
• safer and healthier
• better neighbourhoods

It makes you weep, doesn't it? Others have already commented on these, including the mysterious Bristol Blogger.

And a final point - £75,000 for a Rape Crisis Centre/Service. According to the Leader of the Council it's "shameful" that we don't have one (1:37 on the web cast), and it will service as a "single point of contact" (SPOC) for victims of sexual attacks. But what is a Rape Crisis Centre/Service? The website for the "Rape Crisis Movement" doesn't go into too much detail.

The word "crisis" implies immediacy, but we've already got the Police for emergency response. Avon & Somerset constabulary also have a dedicated Sexual Assault Investigation Team, and a Sexual Assault Referral Centre (SARC) funded by the Home Office along with specialists in abuse and violence taking place within a Domestic context.

And there are numerous public services and charities for follow-up work, including Social Services, The Bristol Crisis Service for Women, Kinergy, Avon Sexual Abuse Centre, and apparently there is a Bristol Sexual Violence Forum, not to mention the Violence Against Women Research Group at the University of Bristol.

If £75,000 will reduce the incidence or impact of sexual violence against men and women, then let's write the cheque today. But what is the mechanism? What capability does the city get for the money? And shouldn't the Police already be the single point of contact for victims of sexually aggravated crime? If they're not, that needs to change.

Herewith my Christmas gift to the people of Bristol on which I've been working all through the holiday season, coming to you live on Christmas morning. Assuming I've got the cron job configured correctly that is. (whoops, I said the quiet part loud, and the loud part quiet).

The Council published its budget proposals for next year on December 17th. Unfortunately they are published as a PDF file, which makes it quite difficult to analyse the figures. Unless of course, you have some software to convert PDF files into Excel spreadsheets.

Here's the original version, and here's my initial conversion.

http://www.jamesbarlow.co.uk/files/draftbccbudgetjmbv1.xls

Broadly speaking the numbers add up (subject to some rounding errors).

If you want to get involved in the budgeting exercise, you could register on this AskBristol.com site and leave a comment. Or you could come along to one of the public budget meetings. You bring the tar, I'll supply the feathers.

A quick orientation for those new to budgeting. This is a revenue budget proposal, detailing changes to last year's budget. Tracking back year by year to find out the origins of spending decisions can be a painful process, but occasionally illuminating. Capital charges and extra borrowing - stuff bought on tick like the £24.7 million for the Museum of Bristol - will not be shown in this accounting.

My initial thoughts:

I've got a fiver that says at some point during the last couple of months a memo went round the senior officers at the council saying something like: "We've got to make an effort to cut costs, so look for ways to increase productivity, and make your departments more efficient". Hey presto: We've got lots of unspecified "efficiency and productivity" line items in the budget. The total saving getting on toward £4 million, which is equivalent to about a £20 saving for every council tax payer. But to be productive is to achieve more with the same resources, and to be efficient is to achieve the same with fewer resources. So when someone tells me they can achieve a saving by simultaneously becoming both more productive and more efficient I get a bit suspicious. I hope they can do it.

The Department of the Chief Executive is really tightening the belt this year, as they propose an increase of only £2 million in their budget (£10 for every council tax payer), including an extra £106,000 pounds for three more issues a year of the "Bristol News" - a glossy PR sheet that I can't recall ever seeing. Regardless, "Bristol News" is now to be renamed "Our City", possibly using the Pluralis Majestatis. The latest issue is available online, and is the usual exercise in spending your money to tell you what a great job is being done spending your money.

I said the numbers added-up, but the Chief Exec is the only one to make a minor slip - their departmental total for the current year doesn't include the £50,000 cost of the Director of Public Health. But what's £50k between friends?

The "Our City" booklet gets the justifications in early, stating:

"In 2008/09 the council will face some unavoidable pressures that will have implications for the budget and will limit the spending options available."

Hacking through the Adult Community Care figures to work out specifically what these implications are will be a proper forensic job - although I have previously discussed the subject of Home Care and Care Homes, which will be the cause of a ruckus in the New Year.

The Planning, Transport and Development directorate wins the award for barmiest accounts - loss of parking income apparently implies and extra £300k in the kitty, and "Increased income and operational savings related to long stay parking, controlled parking zone and street closures" apparently means that instead of losing £585,000 they're only losing £540,000. I'm buggered if I can work out how they calculate their figures, but needless to say the Lord Mayor won't be affected. And don't even get me started on the "Above Inflation increases for local bus service contracts."

It would appear that the Severn Beach Line will finally get the full £450,000 for an increased service. This sort of subsidy is - in the long term - counter productive, but in the short term it might help to alleviate some of the structural problems with the British Railways.

And of course there's another £250,000 in the pot for Abolition 200, back by popular demand for a second year.

The unfunded requirement implied by this budget is £167,120,000.00. That's one hundred and sixty seven million, one hundred and twenty thousand pounds. What does that mean for the tax payer? Well the official statement is that council tax will be going up by 4%. But that doesn't seem to work, unless there's been a massive increase in the taxbase over the last 12 months.

Assuming the Police and the Fire Brigade can stick to something like an inflationary increase in funding - say about 3% - then the overall council tax increase will be around 5%. On a Band D property, your bill will rise from £1423.79 to £1507.12. In Band A, you'll pay an extra £51.53, and in Band H you'll pay an extra £154.60

So, on that note: Merry Xmas!