Onchan District Commissioners — General Fund income and expenditure by service (£)

Onchan District Commissioners — Housing Revenue Account, 2021-22 to 2023-24

Onchan is a landlord as well as a rate authority: it holds 406 houses, flats and bungalows plus 100 sheltered units — 506 dwellings in total, unchanged across all three years shown. The Housing Revenue Account (HRA) is a ring-fenced note funded by rents, service charges and (when reserves run low) 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, exactly as Douglas's and Braddan's much larger and smaller equivalents are kept out of theirs elsewhere on this site. It is, however, folded into Onchan's own "Net cost of services" figure on the way to the published headline (see Notes), so it is summarised in full here.

Onchan District Commissioners — Balance Sheet as at 31 March 2024, 2023 (restated) and 2022

Onchan's net worth jumps from £49.55m (2022) to £66.25m (2023, restated) then holds broadly flat at £66.22m (2024) — but most of that jump is not a real financial movement. Onchan's own audited 2022-23 accounts (signed 11 December 2023) originally showed net assets of only £53,573,306 at 31 March 2023; a subsequent 2025 revaluation of Onchan's social housing found it had been undervalued since 2020, and a prior-year adjustment (note 21 of the 2023-24 accounts) added £12,675,241 to the 2023 comparative shown here. See the note below the table for the full bridge.

Notes, sources and cautions

What this shows. Onchan's General Fund Comprehensive Income and Expenditure Statement (CIES), broken down using Onchan's own unaudited "Detailed Income and Expenditure Account" (every page of it stamped "This page does not form part of the audited financial statements"), for the three years ended 31 March 2022, 2023 and 2024. The Sankey diagram is General Fund only — rate-funded services grouped under Onchan's own four CIES headings: Finance & General Purposes, Works & Cleansing (split here into "Highways, lighting & properties" and "Refuse collection" so the site's refuse colour can be used, matching Castletown's convention for splitting a single committee into coloured sub-flows), Leisure & Amenities, and Government Assisted. Onchan's Housing Revenue Account is a separate, ring-fenced account (rents and, when needed, government grant — not rates) and is deliberately excluded from the diagram; see the Housing tab.

The headline figure is the operating deficit, not the accounting bottom line. Onchan's accounts publish two very different "bottom lines" each year, exactly as Douglas's do. This page uses "(Deficit) on provision of services" — £(115,005), £(318,277) and £(377,447) in 2021-22, 2022-23 and 2023-24 — as the headline, because it reflects the year's actual operating position before non-cash items. The alternative, "Total comprehensive income and expenditure", swings the other way entirely: a surplus of £753,995 (2021-22), £4,020,723 (2022-23) and a small deficit of £(25,447) (2023-24) — dominated by pension remeasurement gains of £869,000, £4,339,000 and £352,000 in those years (large favourable actuarial swings that cut Onchan's net pension liability from £4,542,000 to £532,000 to £123,000 over the period) plus, in 2023-24 only, the £12,675,241 one-off prior-year revaluation correction described below. Using that figure as a headline would make Onchan look like it was making millions a year, which is not what is happening operationally — so it is not used here, and is shown only for context.

A further, smaller headline: the statutory General Fund movement. Onchan's own foreword reports a third number — the "overall movement in the General Fund" used as the basis for rate-setting — of £(49,116) deficit (2021-22), £101,309 surplus (2022-23) and £(11,936) deficit (2023-24). This differs from the CIES deficit above because it adjusts out non-cash depreciation and pension remeasurement and adjusts in loan-principal repayments and capital spend funded from revenue, per the Statement of Movement on Reserves. It is Onchan's own rate-setting number, not this page's headline, but it is included in the detailed table for completeness.

Onchan pays into Douglas's shared waste site — confirmed from both sides. Douglas's own accounts, built elsewhere on this site, disclose the Eastern District Civic Amenity Site Joint Committee at Middle Park and name Onchan as a paying participant at roughly an 18% cost share. Onchan's own accounts confirm this independently, in its own words. Note 10 (Related Party Transactions) of the 2022-23 accounts states: "The Authority, along with other participating authorities, is represented on the Eastern District Civic Amenity Site Joint Committee. Douglas Borough Council is responsible for administering the site; and recharges administration, maintenance and disposal costs incurred onto participating authorities. The Authority paid £479,181 (2022:£122,626) to Douglas Borough Council in respect of Eastern Civic Amenity Site costs with an amount of £10,769 (2022:£11,508) owed as at 31 March 2023." The 2023-24 accounts confirm the relationship again in near-identical wording and add a cost breakdown: "The Authority paid £135,259 (2023: £135,834) to Douglas Borough Council in respect of Eastern Civic Amenity Site disposal costs, £903 in respect of street lighting, £66,436 (2023: £439,944) in respect of Eastern Civic Amenity Site construction costs and £608 (2023: £Nil) of other expenses, with an amount of £14,559 (2023: £10,769) owed as at 31 March 2024." This is a genuine two-sided confirmation — host (Douglas) and payer (Onchan) both independently disclose the same joint arrangement, the same counterparty, and (for the amount owed at each year-end) the same figure to the pound. One further Onchan-specific wrinkle: unlike the other paying authorities, Onchan capitalises its share of the site's construction cost as a fixed asset in its own balance sheet — Note 1 records "Land and buildings includes a share of the jointly controlled Eastern Civic Amenity Site, which is included at a cost of £506,380" (2024), built up from £439,944 (2023) plus £66,436 added in the year — rather than treating the whole payment as a running cost, which is the basis Douglas uses to calculate the ~18% apportionment. A genuine inconsistency in Onchan's own figures, not an OCR error: the 2022-23 accounts report one combined total of £479,181 paid to Douglas that year, but the 2023-24 accounts' own comparative breakdown for the same 2022-23 year (disposal £135,834 + construction £439,944) sums to £575,778 — £96,597 higher. The two years appear to categorise "Eastern Civic Amenity Site costs" on a different basis (construction-year cash paid vs. cumulative asset balance), the same kind of running-costs-vs-capital-costs mismatch flagged on Douglas's own page for this identical arrangement. Both figures are reported here exactly as published, not reconciled to each other.

No other joint service specifically shared with Douglas was found. Onchan is Douglas's immediate northern neighbour, so its accounts were searched specifically for other shared arrangements — library, leisure, refuse — beyond the Eastern Civic Amenity Site. None were found: Onchan runs its own Harvey Briggs Onchan Library and its own refuse collection service in-house, with no joint-board notes for either. The only other Douglas connection in Onchan's accounts is administrative rather than a cost-sharing joint board: Douglas Borough Council is the Administering Authority for the Isle of Man Local Government Superannuation Scheme, in which Onchan (like every other authority on this site) participates — this is common to all Manx local authorities, not a bilateral Onchan-Douglas arrangement, and is not counted as a second joint-service finding.

Prior-year restatement: a £12,675,241 correction to social housing. Onchan's 2023-24 accounts include a prior-year adjustment (note 21) after a formal property valuation as at 31 March 2025 found that social housing had been undervalued since the last full revaluation in 2020. The correction — a £9,795,871 uplift in valuation plus a £2,879,370 write-back of depreciation that should not have been charged — added £12,675,241 to net assets, split £1,092,099 to the capital adjustment account and £11,583,142 to the revaluation reserve, and was applied to the 31 March 2023 comparative shown in the 2023-24 accounts. Onchan's own, separately signed 31 March 2023 balance sheet (approved 11 December 2023) is therefore not directly comparable to the "2023 (restated)" column used on the Balance sheet tab of this page — see that tab for the full bridge. The 31 March 2022 balance sheet has not been restated in any document reviewed and almost certainly carries the same undervaluation, unquantified.

Rates levied is not quite the same figure as rate income recognised — the same gap Douglas shows. Onchan's general rate rose from 326p (2021-22) to 346p (2022-23) to 373p (2023-24), a 14% rise in two years, on a broadly flat net rateable value of about £800,000-£802,000. Note 6 (General Rate Account) shows "General rates levied for the year" of £2,450,775 (sic — restated from the prior year comparative; see Note 6 wording) rising to £2,873,097 and £2,986,162, before discounts, exemptions and refunds of £160,623, £165,289 and £193,699 are deducted to reach the figure credited to the CIES (£2,450,775 shown net of the prior period's discounts is not separately itemised for 2021-22 in the material reviewed). Onchan's own notes do not reconcile "rate in the pound × rateable value" arithmetic to the levied figure line-by-line, the same flagged gap noted on Douglas's page for the same reason — most likely mid-year rateable value changes, discounts and collection adjustments — so it is reported here as published rather than force-reconciled.

Refuse is not charged separately, unlike Castletown. Onchan operates one combined general rate — there is no separate refuse rate or refuse account of the kind Castletown levies. Refuse collection appears here as a coloured sub-flow of "Works and cleansing" purely for legibility and colour-palette consistency with the rest of this site; it is funded from the same general rate as every other General Fund service.

Credits shown as inflows. Several lines — administrative recoveries and Building Regulation/search fees netted against Finance & General Purposes; commercial and garage rents and (in 2022-23 only) small street-lighting income netted against Highways; refuse collection trade income; library, parks/attractions and Onchan Hub income; and the Sewers & Pumping Station government reimbursement, which has no offsetting cost line in Onchan's own schedule — are credits rather than charges. A Sankey cannot draw a negative flow, so each is drawn as its own small inflow; gross service cost therefore reads higher than the net committee totals in the published account, and the two reconcile exactly in every year (see Reconciliation, below the table).

Provenance and confidence. Every figure on this page was OCR-recovered from Onchan's scanned, signed Statements of Accounts (no text layer, 300-400dpi renders, Tesseract 5) and cross-checked in two independent ways: (1) the 2022-23 comparative year was read from both the 2023 accounts (as its own audited year) and the 2023-24 accounts (as the prior-year column) — every income and expenditure line in the detailed schedule agrees to the pound between the two documents; and (2) every committee subtotal re-adds to Onchan's own published CIES Income/Expenditure/Net columns, and income minus expenditure (including the Housing Revenue Account net result) equals the published "(Deficit) on provision of services" exactly in 2022-23 and 2023-24. One OCR misread was caught and corrected this way: the Housing Revenue Account's "Depreciation & impairment charges" for 2022-23 first read as £986,269, which does not let the four expenditure components re-add to the published £2,380,182 total; the correct figure, £980,269, does — and independently matches the £980,269 "Depreciation and impairment of fixed assets" entry for the Housing maintenance reserve column of Onchan's own Statement of Movement on Reserves. One minor discrepancy survives in Onchan's own source figures, not the OCR: the 2021-22 "Works and cleansing" net cost re-adds to £758,992 from the itemised lines in the detailed schedule, one pound different from the £758,991 shown in the audited CIES net column for that year; this £1 rounding is carried through to that year's overall net cost of General Fund services and its "(Deficit) on provision of services" reconciliation (both computed values land exactly £1 away from Onchan's own published figures for 2021-22 only), and is reported here as published rather than silently smoothed over.

Comparability. This diagram uses the same General-Fund-only convention, with Housing Revenue Account shown separately, as Douglas's and Braddan's diagrams elsewhere on this site, and the same "operating headline vs. statutory total" distinction as Douglas's. Onchan is a District-tier authority comparable in scale to Douglas's Borough tier — its General Fund spends roughly £3.6-3.9m gross a year (excluding Housing), around a fifth of Douglas's, but its social housing stock (506 dwellings) and its £15m of long-term borrowing make it far closer in scale and structure to Douglas and Braddan than to the parish authorities also on this site.

Source. Onchan District Commissioners, Statement of Accounts for the years ended 31 March 2023 (signed 11 December 2023) and 31 March 2024 (signed 17 November 2025), Comprehensive Income and Expenditure Statement, Statement of Movement on Reserves, Balance Sheet, Detailed Income and Expenditure Account, and Notes 1, 5, 6, 7, 10, 17 and 21. Both documents supplied as scanned PDFs with no text layer; OCR-recovered and cross-checked as described above, 6 August 2026.