Happy new (financial) year. Looking back at the start of the last financial year and our budgets and spending plans to what our out-turns are going to look like shows how different our original ‘business as usual' plans are to the reality of what we have spent and resourced in the last 12 months.

One thing that is going to make particularly interesting reading, within our out-turn reports and narrative statements for our statement of accounts, will be not just the amount of one-off grant funding we have received this year, but the sheer breadth of what we have delivered as local authorities with that money.