In 2023/24 ALBs spent
£365.75 Bn
RDEL (running costs)
£287.72 Bn (78.7%)
AME (demand-led spending)
£39.15 Bn (10.7%)
CDEL (investment costs)
£38.87 Bn (10.6%)
Cabinet Office | ALB Landscape Analysis 2023-24
ALB Spending
Keywords
ALB, Arm’s Length Bodies, Public Bodies, Quangos, Public Servants, Civil Servants
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ALB spending categories
The total amount of money that an ALB spends is called Total Managed Expenditure (TME). This can be classified as either Annually Managed Expenditure (AME) or within their Departmental Expenditure Limit (DEL). AME is demand-led expenditure that is typically hard to budget for in advance, such as pension or welfare claims. Conversely, DEL is typically the body’s main budget, and is used for more predictable spending, such as long-running programmes and projects.1
DEL spend can be further broken down into Resource DEL (RDEL) and Capital DEL (CDEL). RDEL is the cost of running the organisation, which can be on the body’s programmes or the administrative cost for supporting the body. CDEL is expenditure that provides an investment for the body, such as buying property.
The RDEL and CDEL figures in this section are the sums that the body actually spent (known as actual spending outturn), rather than the body’s budget for it, As such, the spending for ALBs reported below may not directly match up with the values reported in ALB Funding, which captures delegated budgets for 2023/24.
Cash-based and non-cash-based spending
When we commissioned departments for data on their ALBs, we asked for data on RDEL, CDEL, and AME spending to only reflect cash-based spending during 2023/24. Cash-based spending covers money spent by an ALB to cover their operations.
Non-cash spending includes accounting adjustments, such as movements in provisions, depreciation, and adjustments for liabilities, which are often represented as negative values.
ALBs with no spending data
Certain ALBs, such as the Met Office, have Trading Fund status, which means they do not report their spending as captured under AME, CDEL, or RDEL categories. Likewise, ALBs with particular classifications, such as Advisory NDPBs, often operate without a delegated budget from their sponsor, meaning their spending comes out of their sponsor department’s budget. For each of these types of bodies, their spending is typically reported as £0 for each category.
How much do ALBs spend?
Collectively, ALBs spent £365.75 Bn billion in 2023/24. The largest type of spending by ALBs was RDEL Programme spending, which covers ALB running costs, at £282.23 Bn, representing 1.5% of all ALB expenditure.
However, ALB running costs can also include money that is disbursed by the ALB to fund the operations of other organisations as grants-in-aid. In fact grants-in-aid spending represented 73.3%% (£267.92 Bn) of all ALB expenditure, reflecting the roles of NHS England and Education and Skills Funding Agency, who distribute funding to hospitals and schools. respectively. For additional context, the total expenditure for the UK government in 2022/23 was £1,133.6 billion, meaning ALBs represent around a third of all public expenditure.
Cabinet Office | ALB Landscape Analysis 2023-24
Cabinet Office | ALB Landscape Analysis 2023-24
Other types of ALB Spending
Further analysis of ALBs spending on Grants, Consultants and Contingent Labour can be found on the Other Spending page.
Spending by classification
In 2023/24 118 Executive NDPBs collectively spent £229.59 Bn in total, which was 62.8% of all ALB spending. They also spent the most on CDEL (investment spending) at £34.59 Bn. On the other hand, although Advisory, Crown and Tribunal NDPBs make up 42.2% of all ALBs, they together spent only £391.04 M in 2023/24, which represents around 0.11% of all spending by ALBs.
Cabinet Office | ALB Landscape Analysis 2023-24
Cabinet Office | ALB Landscape Analysis 2023-24
RDEL spending
In 2023/24 ALBs collectively spent around £287.72 Bn on RDEL. RDEL spending represents the day-to-day running costs of an ALB, and typically includes the costs related to an ALB’s staff and their back-office functions which each ALB needs to operate such as HR, Communications and Finance. On average, the median proportion of spending on RDEL for all ALBs was 91.5%.
RDEL is also often used to cover the programme spending of ALBs, which can go towards front-line operations performed by the ALB. For example, while (£173.89 Bn) and Education and Skills Funding Agency (£72.12 Bn billion) collectively spent around 85.5% of all RDEL spending, the vast majority of their spending was RDEL Programme spending, which itself was mostly issued as Grants-in-Aid to towards other organisations to carry out front-line services.
Cabinet Office | ALB Landscape Analysis 2023-24
Only includes ALBs with finance values that did not contain adjustments/provisions in their data.
Cabinet Office | ALB Landscape Analysis 2023-24
Cabinet Office | ALB Landscape Analysis 2023-24
CDEL spending
In 2023/24 ALBs spent around £38.87 Bn on CDEL. Ten large ALBs collectively spent £34.52 Bn on CDEL, representing 88.8% of all ALBs’ CDEL spending in 2023/24. These ALBs are organisations which are primarily focussed on investment in infrastructure. For example Network Rail (£5.96 Bn) and HS2 (£7.41 Bn) are ALBs which develop and maintain public transport infrastructure, and these 2 ALBs collectively represented 34.4% of all ALBs’ CDEL spending.
Cabinet Office | ALB Landscape Analysis 2023-24
Only includes ALBs with finance values that did not contain adjustments/provisions in their data.
Cabinet Office | ALB Landscape Analysis 2023-24
Cabinet Office | ALB Landscape Analysis 2023-24
AME spending
In 2023/24 ALBs spent around £39.15 Bn on Annually Managed Expenditure. Most of this was attributed to HMRC, who spent £33.21 Bn billion as AME, which was 84.8% of all ALBs’ AME spend.
HMRC uses AME spending to cover payments for Child Benefits, tax credits and other benefits, reliefs and allowances, which are all susceptible to inflationary pressures. Using AME spending allows HMRC to account for volatile changes in inflation, which may reduce the value of these payments if they were spent under DEL, which is typically allocated years in advance.
Non-cash AME spending
While our commission to Departments and ALBs asked for only cash-based AME spending, which only reflects money spent during the year, some ALBs have still reported non-cash negative values for their AME spending, which is often attributable to movements in provisions. Provisions are liabilities of uncertain timing or amount that need to be accounted for in ALBs’ financial statements. For example NDA’s Nuclear Provision (Annual Report and Accounts, p140) highlights the role that provisions under AME play in estimating the costs and liabilities associated with the retrieval and disposal of nuclear waste.
Cabinet Office | ALB Landscape Analysis 2023-24
Only includes ALBs with finance values that did not contain adjustments/provisions in their data.
Cabinet Office | ALB Landscape Analysis 2023-24
Cabinet Office | ALB Landscape Analysis 2023-24
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