Port St Mary Village Commissioners — Comprehensive Income and Expenditure Statement (£)
Port St Mary Village Commissioners — Balance Sheet as at 31 March 2024
Port St Mary is the largest balance sheet of any authority in this set by a wide margin — £17.2m of net assets, most of it the council housing stock, against £4.49m of commercial bank borrowing. That is more debt than Malew, Marown, Santon and Arbory & Rushen combined, but it also sits behind 122 local-authority houses and a village infrastructure base none of the parish authorities carry.
Notes, sources and cautions
What this shows. Port St Mary's audited Comprehensive Income and Expenditure Statement — actual outturn, not budget — reorganised as a Sankey. Every figure on this diagram is the Net column of that statement (Expenditure minus Income for each of the thirteen lines the Authority itself uses), not the unaudited, more granular "Detailed Income and Expenditure Account" pages that follow it in Port St Mary's own PDF. That detailed schedule is explicitly marked "does not form part of the audited financial statements", and for 2023-24 its own "Recharges" sub-total does not reconcile with the audited statement's net Recharges figure for the same year (see below) — so this diagram is built one level up, from the numbers that are actually audited and that are guaranteed to reconcile.
Port St Mary's council housing turns an operating surplus. Unlike every other line on this diagram, Housing services and Housing deficiency funding are drawn as inflows, coloured separately in purple rather than the standard income teal. Rental income from the Authority's 122 local-authority houses (£707,413 in 2022-23, £752,253 in 2023-24) comfortably exceeds the direct running costs of the housing service, so — net of a Housing Revenue Account this diagram does not otherwise break out — council housing is a net contributor to the general fund in all three years shown: +£150,466, +£131,451 and +£157,673. On top of that, central government pays a separate "housing deficiency" grant (£11,371 → £43,592 → £93,447, rising fast) which is also drawn as an inflow. Both figures come straight off the face of the audited statement; this diagram does not attempt to split housing rental income from housing running costs, because the statement itself does not either.
A rate rise of nearly a tenth in one year. The rate in the pound was 349p (2021-22), 354p (2022-23, up 1.4%) and then 386p for 2023-24 — a 9.0% increase in a single year, against a net rateable value that barely moved (£144,825 → £145,007 → £145,066). Port St Mary's own foreword to the 2023-24 accounts records a further increase to 395.65p from 1 April 2024 (2.5%, for the following year, 2024-25 — not shown on this diagram). The deficit widened in the same period the rate rose fastest: £104,191 (2021-22) → £186,412 (2022-23) → £124,936 (2023-24), so the 2023-24 rate rise did narrow the shortfall, but the Authority remains in deficit throughout the period shown, financed by drawing down the general revenue reserve — which fell from £251,528 to £2,160 over the three years.
Long-term borrowing, and what it is for. Port St Mary carries £4.49m of total borrowing at 31 March 2024 (down from £5.04m two years earlier) — Isle of Man Bank fixed-rate loans (4.95%–5.60%) taken out in prior years, now being refinanced onto HSBC variable-rate facilities (0.65% above SONIA in the current year), all unsecured and sanctioned loan-by-loan by Treasury and the Department of Infrastructure. Loan interest is drawn on this diagram as "Financing costs" — it more than doubled over the period, from £129,824 to £258,286, as rates rose — but loan capital repayments are a balance-sheet movement, not a charge to this income and expenditure account, so they do not appear as a flow here (see the cash flow statement in Port St Mary's own accounts, note 13).
Financing costs also include a swinging pension charge. "Pension current service cost" was a genuine cost in 2021-22 and 2022-23 (£56,000, then £69,000) but flipped to a credit of £22,000 in 2023-24 on actuarial remeasurement — drawn here as an inflow marked "(credit)", exactly like the small net credit on 2023-24's internal SSHJB recharge account (£7,255) and the "Parks and leisure" line, which swung from a small net income (rents from allotments and the golf course exceeding maintenance) in 2021-22 and 2022-23 to a net cost in 2023-24 once golf course rental income dropped to nil.
Provenance and confidence. Port St Mary's accounts are published only as scanned images with no text layer, so every figure was recovered by OCR and then verified rather than trusted. Three independent checks were applied in every year: the thirteen Net-column lines re-add to the published "Net cost of General Fund services"; that figure, combined with the two Housing lines, re-adds to the published "Net cost of services"; and that figure, combined with rate income, interest and financing costs, equals the published deficit exactly — in all three years. The 2022-23 column was read independently from both the 2023 and 2024 accounts and the two readings agree to the pound, as do the rate poundage and net rateable value notes and the balance sheet. One genuine scan gap: the 2023 PDF's physical page 42 is a duplicate scan of page 41, so the printed page carrying 2021-22's line-item detail for Public Works, Street Cleaning, Public Conveniences, Parks & Leisure and Maintenance of Public Areas was never captured — those five lines are shown here only at the Net-column total available from the audited statement itself, not broken into their own sub-items as the 2022-23 and 2023-24 equivalents are (in the underlying unaudited schedule, which is not what this diagram is built from regardless). No published total anywhere on this diagram rests on a figure that could not be independently reconciled.
Not the same body as Rushen or Port Erin. Port St Mary Village Commissioners is one of two Village-tier authorities in the south of the Island — the other being Port Erin — each with its own separate Commissioners. Neither is part of Arbory & Rushen, the parish body shown elsewhere on this site, despite sharing the Rushen sheepdip; the "Southern Sheltered Housing Joint Board" and "Southern Civic Amenity Site" referenced throughout these accounts are shared arrangements with neighbouring southern authorities, administered by Port St Mary, but the accounts themselves are Port St Mary's alone.
Comparability. Port St Mary reports on the same audited, accruals-basis outturn as Arbory & Rushen and Malew, for an overlapping set of years, so a genuine read-across on rate poundage and net cost of services is possible. It is a materially larger, more indebted authority than any of the parish Commissioners shown elsewhere on this site — its £4.49m of borrowing and 122-house social housing stock have no equivalent at Marown, Santon or Braddan, and exceed Malew's £263,423.
Source. Port St Mary Village Commissioners, Financial Statements for the years ended 31 March 2023 and 31 March 2024 — Comprehensive Income and Expenditure Statement, Balance Sheet, and Notes 6, 7 and 16. Certified by the Tynwald Auditor General, reviewed by the Authority's independent auditor. Retrieved from gov.im, 6 August 2026.