Sefton Council
Metropolitan borough council for Sefton, Merseyside, including Southport.
Sefton Council ended 2025-26 with £3.2m of reserves and a £104m deficit on its Dedicated Schools Grant, the sharpest such gap in England on Lowdown's reading of returns published on 17 September 2026.
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Sefton holds £3.2m against a £104m schools deficit. What happens when the override ends?
Timeline for Sefton Council
Held £3.2m of reserves against a £104m schools deficit
Is Britain Actually Broke?: Sefton holds £3.2m against £104m deficitBackground
Sefton Council is the metropolitan borough council for Sefton in Merseyside, a borough that takes in Southport. Its 2025-26 revenue outturn return records £731m of net current expenditure.
Set against that spending, the council finished the year with £3.2m of total reserves and a £104m deficit on its Dedicated Schools Grant. Among the 292 authorities whose returns Lowdown summed, Sefton is one of 100 where the schools deficit exceeds the whole unallocated reserve, and the most extreme case in England.
The deficit matters for Sefton's solvency rather than its schools alone. A temporary override shields council accounts from schools deficits, and when it lapses after 2027-28 a liability many times the size of Sefton's reserves falls on a council with almost nothing set aside.
Sefton's schools deficit dwarfs its reserves
Sefton's 2025-26 outturn return, published by the housing ministry on 17 September, puts its schools deficit at £104m against total reserves of £3.2m, a ratio of about 32 to one. The council's own papers give a higher figure for the accumulated high-needs deficit, £106m. Sefton drew £28m from reserves during the year and made no capitalisation under section 16(2)(b).
Only the statutory override keeps that £104m out of Sefton's accounts, and it expires at the end of 2027-28. The government's promised grant for 90% of deficits held on 31 March 2026 would still leave Sefton with roughly £10.4m to cover, more than three times everything it holds in reserve.
