Local Authority Expenditure Index

This section looks at what local authorities spend and how it is financed.

Total local authority own expenditure in this section is defined as the contribution of local authorities to Total Managed Expenditure - the measure of total public expenditure from national accounts. As such, the total excludes transfers to other parts of the public sector such as debt interest paid to central government

Local authority spending can be looked at in a number of ways.

It can be analysed in terms of how it is financed and can be shown as the the sum of  central government support for local authorities within Departmental Expenditure Limits (DEL) and Departmental Annually Managed Expenditure (AME), plus locally financed expenditure in AME (council tax and other local revenue).

It can be analysed in terms of what the expenditure is for - such as education or social services. Or it can be broken down by economic category such as pay, procurement, subsidies and other grants.  It can also be divided between current and capital expenditure.

The analyses of spending deal primarily with Great Britain. Equivalent spending relating to Northern Ireland is central government spending carried out by Northern Ireland departments. Where appropriate, district council spending in Northern Ireland is included.

The information on central government support for local authorities is consistent with PESA 2004. Outturn figures for total local authority expenditure are consistent with the latest national accounts' data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS). Data for the latest year are from local authority budget plans.

back to top

Local authority expenditure data is collected via a suite of statistical returns by the 

• Office of the Deputy Prime Minister (ODPM)
• Scottish Executive (SE)
• National Assembly for Wales (NAW) 
• Northern Ireland (NI)

For more information on local authority finance in England visit the Department for Transport, Local Government and the Regions website.

For further information on Local Authorities please see links below.

The document on Local Authorities is available below in Adobe Acrobat Portable Document Format (PDF). If you do not have Adobe Acrobat installed on your computer you can download the software free of charge from the Adobe website.

For alternative ways to read PDF documents and further information on website accessibility visit the HM Treasury accessibility page.

There is also a text version of the document available below.

Internal links

• LA´s own expenditure
• LA total expenditure by economic category
• LA capital expenditure
• LA expenditure by department with policy responsibility
• Financing of Local Authorities Expenditure: summary

Media links

• Excel file of Local Authority Expenditure data
• CSV file of Local Authority Expenditure data
• Pdf file of Local Authorities (64KB)
• Text file of Local Authorities

back to top

Public Spending Statistics index