Bride Parish Commissioners — Comprehensive Income and Expenditure Statement (£)

Bride Parish Commissioners — Balance Sheet as at 31 March 2025

Bride is a small, unleveraged authority — no borrowing anywhere in four years of accounts, and no housing stock. Its only long-term liability is a static £2,000 unrevalued pension figure. Net assets moved from £196,376 (2022) down to £166,194 (2024) and back up to £173,146 (2025), tracking the parish's swings between deficit and surplus.

Notes, sources and cautions

What this shows. Bride's audited Comprehensive Income and Expenditure Statement — actual outturn, not budget. Like Santon, Bride has no committee structure in its accounts: a single flat list of income and expense lines. That flat structure is preserved here; the functional colouring (waste, environment & leisure, works, administration, compliance & finance, non-cash) is an Observatory overlay for reading, not a grouping Bride itself publishes.

Four years, not three. Bride is the only one of the small rural parishes in this set with three source PDFs on file, and each one carries a full prior-year comparative column, so four distinct financial years reconcile end to end: years ended 31 March 2022, 2023, 2024 and 2025. Every one of the three overlapping comparative columns (2023 appears in both the 2023 and 2024 accounts; 2024 appears in both the 2024 and 2025 accounts) was read independently from both source documents and the two readings agree exactly.

Bride swings both ways. Unlike Marown (deficit every year, drawing on reserves throughout) or Santon (surplus every year), Bride alternates: a £20,884 surplus in 2021-22, then deficits of £25,395 and £4,787 in the following two years, then a £6,952 surplus in 2024-25. Deficit years are drawn from reserves and shown as a hatched inflow on the left, exactly as in the Marown diagram; surplus years are shown as an outflow to reserves on the right, exactly as in the Santon diagram. This is the only one of the three small-parish pages that needs both conventions.

The 2024-25 story is a committee exit. Bride's own subsequent-events note records that on 1 April 2024 — the first day of the following year — it withdrew from the Northern Civic Amenity Site committee. The 2024-25 accounts duly show £0 for "Civic amenity site" for the first time in four years, replaced by a new £31,172 "Waste disposal" line and a near-doubling of employee pension cost alongside a £14,784 clerk's salary. Rates collection charges, insurance, accountancy and office expenses all rose the same year.

Rate in the pound and rateable value. Taken from note 9 of each year's accounts, titled "Total rateable value" in Bride's own accounts. The rates poundage rose every year on record — 60p (2021-22), 62p, 65p, then 70p (2024-25) — and refuse poundage rose from 67p to 72p over the same period. A caution on the label: the £ figures under this note (£229,896 → £201,354) do not behave like a conventional net rateable value — dividing the amount raised by the poundage implies a shrinking valuation base each year, which is not how NRV moves in the other parishes in this set. These figures are reproduced exactly as Bride's own accounts present them, under Bride's own heading, but they read more like the amounts actually levied at that poundage than a stable property valuation, and should be treated with that caution rather than compared directly to another authority's NRV.

Bride's own website states that it "prides itself on the lowest rates throughout the Isle of Man" and publishes audited accounts back to 2018 plus separate rates pages, but no rate poundage history beyond the current and prior year. Nothing on bridecommissioners.im contradicts the figures below; nothing on it materially extends them either, so the four years here rest entirely on the three audited PDFs.

Provenance and confidence. Bride publishes its accounts only as scanned images with no text layer, so every figure was recovered by OCR at 300–400dpi and then verified rather than trusted. All three checks were applied in every year: every expense list re-adds to the published expenditure total; the overlapping comparative columns read identically from both source documents; and income minus expenditure equals the published surplus or deficit exactly. Several OCR misreads were caught and corrected this way — 2022-23 "Toilet block cleaning and maintenance" resolves to £3,221 (not £4,221) because only that figure makes the year's expenses foot to £158,178; 2023-24 "Accountancy fees" resolves to £3,375 and "Search fees" to £80 (not £4,375 and £40) because only that pair makes the year foot to £155,117; and the 2022-23 balance sheet's "Total assets less current liabilities" resolves to £170,981 (not £176,981) because that is the only reading that both matches the reserves subtotal on the same page and matches the prior-year comparative column printed a year later in the 2024 accounts.

Comparability. Not directly comparable with the Braddan diagram, which is built from forward estimates on a rates-funded basis rather than audited outturn. Bride, Marown and Santon are all on the same accounting basis and share overlapping years, so those three can be read against each other.

Source. Bride Parish Commissioners, Statements of Accounts for the years ended 31 March 2023, 31 March 2024 and 31 March 2025, Comprehensive Income and Expenditure Statement, Balance Sheet and Notes to the Statement of Accounts. Retrieved from gov.im, 6 August 2026.