# Council reserves and borrowing

> Published revenue reserves and gross borrowing across London authorities.

- Category: Money
- Cadence: annual
- Status: Published on a annual cadence.
- Dataset key: `council-reserves-and-borrowing`
- Source: [MHCLG](https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/local-authority-capital-expenditure-and-receipts-in-england-final-outturn-time-series)
- Licence: Open Government Licence v3.0 — [terms](https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government-licence/version/3/)
- Canonical page: [https://londongraph.com/g/council-reserves-and-borrowing](https://londongraph.com/g/council-reserves-and-borrowing)
- Machine-readable record: [https://londongraph.com/data/council-reserves-and-borrowing](https://londongraph.com/data/council-reserves-and-borrowing)

## Methodology

Revenue reserves combine published year-end schools, dedicated-schools-grant, public-health, other earmarked and unallocated balances; negative balances remain negative. Gross borrowing is the MHCLG prudential-system balance at 31 March. The two measures have different purposes and are not netted into a solvency score.

## Visualisations

- [Published balances](https://londongraph.com/g/council-reserves-and-borrowing): Keep reserves and gross borrowing visibly separate by authority.
- [Reserves vs borrowing](https://londongraph.com/g/council-reserves-and-borrowing?view=relationship): Compare the two published balances without netting them into a score.
- [Distributions](https://londongraph.com/g/council-reserves-and-borrowing?view=distribution): Compare each balance's median, quartiles and published range.

## Citation guidance

Attribute the original publisher named above and identify LondonGraph as the visualisation and methodology layer. Do not describe live values as a historical census, and do not present placeholder values as observations.