Statement of Accounts Consultation

Presenting our accounts to you

Every year, Lambeth Council has a full set of accounts, which are audited and agreed. We currently publish our accounts on the web site. The accounts are published in full. An extract is shown as option 1 in this document.

We would like to ask your views on how we present our accounts, so that we can provide a summary of the accounts that is clear and understandable, and provides the information that you would like to see. The council’s finances can seem complicated. The money the council has to spend comes from many sources - not just the council tax, and the budget is broken down into a large number of areas.

We would like you to tell us what information about our accounts you would like to see, and in what format. Let us know your thoughts and we will then put a summary of accounts together as you have requested.

The information in our full accounts is presented in the way that Chartered Institute of Public Finance Accountants (CIPFA) requires. There is a format that all local authorities have to use, so that the accounts from one local authority can be compared easily with another. In order to do this, we use CIPFA categories for our individual services, instead of the structure of departments in the council. It is things like this that we would like your opinion on - how would you like to see our accounts and see us describe our spending? What level of detail would you like to see?

We have reviewed the ways that other councils show their accounts, and produced two different ways of presenting the accounts - options 2 and 3 show charts and explanation about how the accounts work. Or we could present the accounts to you using the layout  in option 1 (the full version) with notes to explain the accounting terms.

Please take the time look at the 3 options and complete the online questionnaire - we want to provide a summary of our accounts that will be useful to you, and easy to understand.

View the options

Complete the questionnaire