I heard that Tories in the Wantage area have been claiming that The Beacon has a smaller deficit now than when the Liberal Democrats were in power (up until May 2011). (By ‘deficit’, we’ve always meant the difference between their income and expenses, which is roughly the amount Vale contributes to their running costs every year.)

I was pretty sure this wasn’t true. (I reserve judgement about whether it was another deliberate campaign lie, or simple ignorance about finances. Or something else?)

So I asked officers for a view of the finances over the years. Here’s what I got back.

The table below sets out the budgeted income and expenditure for The Beacon, and the actual income and expenditure for the Beacon. It also sets out the Planned Budget (the budgeted income and expenditure) and the Council Contribution (the actual income and expenditure), plus the variance. 

The difference between actual income and actual expenditure is what we’ve all called the ‘deficit’. It is the same thing as the column called ‘council contribution’.

(The rightmost column isn’t too interesting except to demonstrate the Tories’ pattern of poor financial management; last year, for example, they ended the year £31k over budget, or 12.9% over budget.)

It speaks for itself really.

Here’s another bit of info in response to a FOI request from a local resident who wanted to know how high the deficit was in each year, in terms of percentage of council tax : The column called Wantage taxbase is he number of household in Wantage that pay tax.

If you consider the district council tax that a household in Wantage pays (column 2), then 47% of that is going to subsidise The Beacon.

In other words, in the year that ended in May 2018, each Wantage household paid £121.69 in council tax. Of that, you could look at it as about £57 went to subside the deficit at The Beacon. (I don’t have comparable figures for earlier years, only the operational deficits above.)

My point in all this? Leisure facilities are within council’s non-statutory services. Those are services that aren’t required by law. So as the central government continues to strangle the  budgets of local authorities, it would be reasonable to expect that funding of The Beacon could come under threat. (Just like the funding for all leisure facilities in Vale could be under threat.)

I’ve seen no evidence that The Beacon is actively trying to reduce their dependency on council funding, and I think any good management would include such actions in their risk mitigation.

Is there any risk assessment and mitigation going on at all? To hear about that, we need to ask Cllr Alice Badcock, who is the Cabinet member responsible for leisure services.