Garff Parish District Commissioners — Comprehensive Income and Expenditure Account (£)

Garff Parish District Commissioners — Balance Sheet as at 31 March 2025

Garff carries far more borrowing than any other Parish-tier authority reviewed on this site — £984,935 outstanding at 31 March 2025 (2024: £986,916; 2023: £924,163), split between ordinary commercial bank loans (HSBC, Isle of Man Bank) and a direct Isle of Man Government Loan of £132,647 (2024: £141,974), a distinct class of borrowing not seen at all in Malew, Arbory & Rushen or the smaller parishes in this set. The scale reflects the authority formed by the 2016 merger of Laxey, Lonan and Maughold — now the largest local authority on the island by area — and its capital programme: the Cooil Roi sheltered housing complex, the authority's share of building the Eastern Civic Amenity Site, and even the Laxey Skate Park, which the Board's own foreword says was "funded through the Government loan facility".

Notes, sources and cautions

What this shows. Garff's audited Comprehensive Income and Expenditure Statement, expanded to line-item detail using the authority's own Detailed Income and Expenditure Account (which "does not form part of the audited financial statements" but reproduces the same audited totals) and its Housing Revenue Income and Expenditure note. Six spending groups follow Garff's own committee structure: Finance and general purposes (which here also carries the small Property account), Works and development, Parks and leisure (which also carries the Swimming Pool contribution), Refuse disposal, Housing services at the Cooil Roi complex, and a sixth group — Depreciation, pensions & debt servicing — bundling the non-committee overhead and financing lines (depreciation, the pension scheme's net current service cost, loan interest and net pension interest) the same way Malew's diagram isolates "Debt servicing" from service spending.

A 2016 merger, and its rates took six years to fully unify. Garff Parish District Commissioners were formed in 2016 from the merger of Laxey Village District and the parish districts of Lonan and Maughold, and are now the largest local authority on the Isle of Man by geographical area. The clearest financial fingerprint of that merger sits in note 13 of the 2023 accounts: for 2021/22, Garff was still striking three separate rate poundages across the sheading — 147p, 112p and 126p — and three separate flat refuse charges — £157, £151 and £136 per property — presumably the inherited legacy rates of Laxey, Lonan and Maughold. Only from 2022/23, six years after the merger, did Garff move to a single unified rate (152p, and a single £171 refuse charge) across the whole authority. That unification year is the first year shown in this diagram.

Two joint boards, in two different directions. Garff's own foreword states plainly: "The Commissioners work with neighbouring Authorities in the East and North of the island to provide the Eastern and Northern Civic Amenity Sites, Northern Swimming Pool, and Northern Sheltered Housing." The 2023 accounts add that the Eastern Civic Amenity Site is at Middle Park in Braddan — construction costs were paid in part to Douglas Borough Council. So Garff is a confirmed participant in two separate joint arrangements: a Northern group (amenity site, swimming pool and sheltered housing) reflecting Lonan and Maughold's position in the north-east, and a distinct Eastern group with authorities further south, run out of Braddan/Douglas. Both appear as related-party payments in note 9 every year (Northern Civic Amenity Site: £25,288 to £30,362 across the period; Eastern Civic Amenity Site: £41,437 to £50,674) and are drawn here inside the Refuse disposal and Parks and leisure groups respectively, since that is where Garff's own accounts book them.

Two deficit years, then a 14% rate rise. Garff ran a deficit of £65,331 in 2022/23 and £7,206 in 2023/24 — both years drawn from reserves (shown hatched on the left of the diagram) — before swinging to a £92,829 surplus in 2024/25. The turnaround follows a stated, deliberate strategy: the Board raised rates 10.5% for 2023/24 and a further 14% for 2024/25, and its own foreword for 2024/25 describes "a particular objective being to strengthen the level of reserves to assist cash-flow and protect against unforeseen events." General revenue reserves rose accordingly, from £328,436 (2023) to £291,306 (2024, a fall) to £370,089 (2025).

Two rate charges, bundled into one flow. Garff levies a conventional poundage-based general rate (152p in 2022/23, rising to 191.5p by 2024/25) and a separate flat refuse charge per property (£171, rising to £215.50) — a different charging mechanism, not a second poundage. Garff's own Comprehensive Income and Expenditure Statement showed these as a single combined "Rates income" line in 2022/23 and 2023/24; only the 2024/25 accounts split it into "Rates income" (general, £595,293) and "Refuse rates income" (£417,334), which sum to the same combined total this diagram uses throughout for comparability across all three years.

Housing at Cooil Roi is subsidised directly by central government. Garff's sheltered housing complex runs a Housing Revenue Account distinct from the general rate fund, and — unlike Malew's now-demolished housing stock or Arbory & Rushen's self-funding dwellings — its shortfall is met every year by an Isle of Man Government "deficiency grant" administered by the Department of Infrastructure: £111,877 (2022), rising to £144,194 (2024) before easing to £122,885 (2025). Related-party note 9 shows part of the interest on the Isle of Man Government Loan itself (£14,975 of £14,975 charged in 2025) is also met directly through this deficiency route, not paid by ratepayers.

Pension scheme swung from liability to asset. Garff's share of the Isle of Man Local Government Superannuation Scheme (administered by Douglas Borough Council) showed a net liability of £151,000 at 31 March 2022, falling to £14,000 (2023), then flipping to a net asset of £9,000 (2024) before settling at exactly £nil (2025) after an asset-ceiling adjustment. The pension scheme's net current service cost and net interest cost were consequently genuine costs in 2022/23 (a combined £25,000) but net credits in 2023/24 and 2024/25 — shown in this diagram as income rather than as expenditure in the years they ran as a credit, exactly as Garff's own Comprehensive Income and Expenditure Statement presents them.

Provenance and confidence. Garff publishes its accounts only as scanned images with no text layer, so every figure here was recovered by OCR at 300–400dpi and then verified rather than trusted. Three checks were applied throughout: every group's detail lines re-add to that group's own published subtotal; the 2023/24 year appears as the current year in the 2024 accounts and as the prior-year comparative in the 2025 accounts, and both readings were taken and cross-checked; and income minus expenditure equals the published result for the year exactly, in all three years. Six OCR issues were caught and corrected this way: (1) Parks and leisure income for 2024/25 first read as £53,413 on the summary Comprehensive Income and Expenditure Statement — the detailed schedule and the arithmetic (£245,484 − £58,413 = £187,071, and the published Net cost of services income total of £463,564) both require £58,413. (2) The 2023/24 "Deficit on provision of services" first read as £(7,296) in the 2024 accounts; the figure independently read from the 2025 accounts' comparative column, and required by the arithmetic (net cost of services −£840,221 + rates income £891,139 + profit on sale £5,000 − interest £63,124 = −£7,206), is £(7,206). (3) The "£" glyph was repeatedly misread as "8" throughout the Detailed Income and Expenditure Account (e.g. "$54,211" for £854,211; "$2,098" for £82,098; "$1,482" for £81,482) — corrected by pattern and confirmed by re-adding each subtotal. (4) Public conveniences costs for 2023/24 first read as £4,098 at 400dpi; only £4,698 closes the Parks and leisure subtotal to the published £233,521, and that figure is also what both the 2024 and 2025 accounts' detail schedules independently show for that year. (5) Capital receipts reserve at 31 March 2025 first read as £236; the Statement of Movement on Reserves shows it unchanged from the prior year's £286, and only £286 closes total reserves to the published net assets figure of £4,046,253. (6) Note 13's certified rateable value at 31 March 2024, printed in Garff's own 2024 accounts as £359,031, is arithmetically inconsistent with that year's own general rate levied (£547,626 at 168p implies a rateable value of £325,968) — and the 2025 accounts' own comparative column silently restates the same date as £325,968. This appears to be a genuine error in Garff's 2024 accounts, corrected the following year; £325,968 is used throughout this page.

Comparability. Garff is on the same audited, accruals-basis Comprehensive Income and Expenditure Statement as Arbory & Rushen, and can be read against it directly — both are 2016–2020-era merged authorities with their own housing stock. It is not directly comparable with Braddan's diagram, which is built from forward budget estimates rather than audited outturn.

Source. Garff Parish District Commissioners, Statement of Accounts for the years ended 31 March 2023, 31 March 2024 and 31 March 2025 — Comprehensive Income and Expenditure Statement, Statement of Movement on Reserves, Balance Sheet, Detailed Income and Expenditure Account, and Notes 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9, 13 and 15. Certified by the Tynwald Auditor General; independent audit report by Crowe Isle of Man Audit LLC. Retrieved from gov.im, 6 August 2026.