Douglas Borough Council — General Fund income and expenditure by service (£)

Douglas Borough Council — Housing Revenue Account, 2022-23 to 2024-25

Douglas is a landlord as well as a rate authority: it holds by far the largest council housing stock of any authority on this site — 2,372 dwellings plus 138 sheltered units in 2023, standing at 2,244 dwellings plus 138 sheltered units (2,382 in total) by 2025. The Housing Revenue Account (HRA) is legally ring-fenced and self-funded from rents, service charges and an Isle of Man Government housing deficiency grant — it does not draw on the general rate, and is deliberately kept out of the Sankey above. It is, however, folded into Douglas's single published "Net deficit on provision of services" headline (see the stat card and Notes), so it is summarised in full here.

Douglas Borough Council — Balance Sheet as at 31 March 2023, 2024 and 2025

Douglas is roughly 60-100× the scale of the parish authorities elsewhere on this site, and comfortably the largest balance sheet here — closer to a small city government than to Braddan, previously the biggest authority on this site (Braddan's balance sheet is about £32.8m; Douglas's council housing stock alone is worth £320.5m). This is not the same thing as the Sankey above: the diagram shows one year's General-Fund revenue flow, of the order of £15-20m; the balance sheet is a full-accruals snapshot of everything Douglas owns and owes, dominated by decades of housing and infrastructure investment.

Notes, sources and cautions

What this shows. Douglas's General Fund Comprehensive Income and Expenditure Statement (CIES), broken down by the fifteen service lines Douglas itself reports gross income and gross expenditure against, for the three years ended 31 March 2023, 2024 and 2025. The Sankey diagram is General Fund only — rate-funded services. Douglas's Housing Revenue Account is a separate, legally ring-fenced, self-funding account (rents and government grant, not rates) and is deliberately excluded from the diagram, exactly as Braddan's much smaller housing account is excluded from Braddan's diagram elsewhere on this site. See the Housing tab for the HRA on its own terms.

The headline figure is the operating result, not the accounting bottom line. Douglas's accounts publish two very different "bottom lines" each year. This page uses "Net deficit on provision of services" (£6.217m, £9.220m and £4.445m in 2022-23, 2023-24 and 2024-25) as the headline, because it reflects the year's actual funding position. The alternative, "Total Comprehensive Expenditure", is a much larger positive swing the other way — a net comprehensive income of £48.231m, £64.802m and £10.877m in the same three years — almost entirely non-cash fixed-asset revaluation gains (£26.4m, £72.7m and £16.1m) and pension remeasurement gains sitting outside the operating account. Using that figure as a headline would make Douglas look like it was making tens of millions of pounds a year, which is not what is happening operationally. It is not used here for that reason, and is shown only in this note for context.

Why the Sankey's own total differs from the published headline. The published Net deficit on provision of services combines the General Fund result and the Housing Revenue Account result in one statutory figure — that is how Douglas's Comprehensive Income and Expenditure Statement is structured. Because the Sankey diagram shows General Fund flows only, its own balancing flow — labelled "General Fund position for the year" — comes to a smaller deficit each year (£5.577m, £3.060m and £2.476m) than the published headline. The gap in every year is exactly the Housing Revenue Account's own self-funded deficit for that year (£0.640m, £6.160m and £1.969m) — see the Housing tab. The two add up to the published headline exactly, in all three years; that identity is checked in code, not assumed. A further caution: the General Fund balancing flow itself is not simply "cash drawn from reserves" — Douglas's own General Fund revenue reserve is only £1.29m–£1.74m across these years, far smaller than the £2.5–5.6m gap — because a large share of General Fund "expenditure" here is non-cash depreciation and IAS19 pension cost adjustments that are reversed out through the capital adjustment account and pensions reserve under the statutory Movement in Reserves Statement, not funded from cash reserves at all.

Rates levied is not quite the same figure as rate income recognised. Douglas's rate in the pound rose sharply — 468p (2022-23) to 509p (2023-24) to 573p (2024-25), a 22% rise in two years, against a broadly flat net rateable value of around £2.75m. Multiplying the two gives the amount of rates levied each year (£12.854m, £14.004m and £15.782m) — but the amount actually credited to the General Fund CIES as "Income from the General Rate Fund" is somewhat lower in every year (£12.492m, £13.666m and £15.382m), a gap of roughly £340,000-£400,000 a year. Douglas's own accounts do not reconcile that gap line-by-line in the material reviewed, so it is reported here as a flagged discrepancy — most likely discounts, reliefs and collection-rate adjustments — rather than silently merged into one figure. The Sankey uses the CIES-recognised figure, because that is the one the published net deficit reconciles against.

How fifteen services were bucketed into this site's category colours. This site uses a fixed seven-colour palette for expenditure categories, developed for much smaller parish committee structures. Douglas's fifteen General Fund service lines were grouped, as a judgement call, into: Waste & Environmental Services (Waste Services) in the refuse colour; Property, Highways & Car Parks (Asset Management, Car Parks, Public & Decorative Lighting) in the works colour; Parks, Gardens & Cemeteries (Parks/Gardens/Recreational Facilities, Cemeteries & Crematorium) in the parks colour; Corporate Support & Administration (Support Services, Administration & Management, Democratic Core) in the finance/general-purposes colour; Regulatory Enforcement & Income Collection (Income Collection, Regulatory Enforcement) in the discounts colour; and — following the precedent set on Castletown's diagram, which faced the same problem with its library and civic centre — two further groups sharing the same neutral colour, distinguished by label and position rather than hue: Civic & Cultural Services (Library, City Centre Management & Public Events) and Depreciation, Amortisation & Pension Cost Adjustments (the two cross-cutting non-service accounting lines that appear on every service in the source data but are shown here as their own group for legibility). Income lines are all drawn in the income colour regardless of service, matching every other diagram on this site.

One expenditure line goes negative. "Cost adjustment regarding pensions" is a credit rather than a charge in 2023-24 (£(423)k) — an actuarial swing running the other way that year. Following the convention already used on Castletown's diagram, a negative expenditure line is drawn as its own small credit inflow rather than as a negative outflow, which a Sankey cannot render; the underlying total expenditure figure is unaffected either way.

"Douglas City Council", not "Douglas Borough Council". Douglas's own Statement of Accounts is headed "Douglas City Council" throughout. The Isle of Man Government's roster of local authorities, and this site, both use "Douglas Borough Council" — the title above follows that convention for consistency with the rest of the Observatory, but Douglas's own self-description is "City Council" and that is worth knowing if you go looking for its accounts directly.

Scale. Douglas is the Isle of Man's capital and by a wide margin the largest authority covered on this site so far — roughly 60-100× the size of a typical parish commission, and closer in absolute scale to a small city government than to Braddan, previously the biggest authority here. Its General Fund alone spends £17-19m gross a year before Housing; Braddan's whole rates account is about £2.5m.

Douglas hosts a joint waste facility that four other authorities pay into. Note 12.4 of Douglas's accounts discloses the Eastern District Civic Amenity Site Joint Committee — Douglas operates the shared household waste and recycling site at Middle Park Industrial Estate on behalf of itself, Onchan, Braddan, Garff and Santon, who each pay Douglas a cost-apportioned share of the running costs. On the running-costs-only basis used from 2024 onward, the apportionment is roughly Douglas 62.5%, Onchan 17.7%, Braddan 12.8%, Garff 5.4% and Santon 1.7% of a total that grew from £764k (2022-23) to £820k (2023-24) to £909k (2024-25) — Douglas's own share is roughly £479k/£513k/£568k of that, already embedded within Douglas's own Waste Services cost above, not an addition to it. This is a different joint arrangement from the Southern Local Authorities Swimming Pool Board (Santon, Port Erin, Castletown) and the Northern authorities' joint boards (Andreas, Ballaugh, Bride, Jurby) already documented elsewhere on this site — worth noting, Santon appears to pay into both the Southern pool board and this Eastern civic amenity site, two separate joint arrangements. One genuine inconsistency, not an OCR error: the 2023 accounts' note 12.4 states "costs recoverable" figures that include one-off capital-scheme costs alongside running costs, which are not directly comparable to the running-costs-only apportionment basis used from 2024 onward — this is flagged here rather than silently blended into a single trend line.

Borrowing — pooled, not itemised, and not a direct government loan. Douglas's £85-91m of long-term borrowing is entirely by bank loan facility sanctioned by the Isle of Man Government's Treasury/Department of Infrastructure under the Local Authority Borrowing Scheme, drawn from a pooled "Loans Pool" and not itemised loan-by-loan in the accounts reviewed. This is a different arrangement from Garff, the only other authority on this site that discloses borrowing directly from the Isle of Man Government as a distinct, itemised loan (around £123k-£147k) sitting alongside its own bank loans.

Provenance and confidence. Two extraction agents independently OCR'd and cross-checked every figure on this page using the standard three-check method: group and total subtotals re-add exactly; comparative years read identically across adjacent published documents; and income minus expenditure reproduces each year's published result. A handful of OCR misreads were caught and corrected by that arithmetic constraint before this page was built, including: "Total current liabilities" first misread as £(21,040)k against an actual £(11,040)k; the 2025 "Total assets less current liabilities" first misread as £239,885k against an actual £289,885k; and a fixed-asset note figure first misread as £312,615k against an actual £12,615k. All three were caught because the corrected figures are the only ones that make the surrounding subtotals re-add.

Source. Douglas Borough Council (Douglas City Council), Statement of Accounts for the years ended 31 March 2023, 2024 and 2025, General Fund Comprehensive Income and Expenditure Statement, Housing Revenue Account, Balance Sheet and Note 12.4 (Joint Committees), published at gov.im. Retrieved 6 August 2026.