Data collected to make recommendations for NT Grants Commission

As part of the distribution of the Identified Local Road grants, the Northern Territory  Grants Commission maintains a local roads data base.

The Northern Territory Grants Commission maintains and update the local roads data based through the assistance of councils each year via the Annual Road Return data collection process. The Road Returns are sent to councils in February each year for update of which council’ s Chief Executive Officers must certify the accuracy of the roads data supplied.

The Northern Territory Grants Commission’s local roads data base is also used by the Department of the Chief Minister and Cabinet in assessing and confirming eligibility of damaged roads under the Disaster Recovery Funding Arrangements.

The latest collection of road lengths used by the Northern Territory Grants Commission in the grant recommendations includes details of the road lengths for each council, broken up into the following categories:

• sealed roads
• formed roads
• gravel roads
• unformed roads
• cycle paths.

Local Road lengths for any given year for all councils can be found in the Northern Territory Grants Commission Annual Reports  – Schedule 3.

Annual reports can be found on the Territory Stories website.

The Northern Territory Grants Commission collects information from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) on population every year to use in their grant recommendations. Each year the latest ABS estimated resident population figures usually available late March are then adjusted to align with the population total advised by the Commonwealth for funding purposes for the coming financial year.

Population totals for any given year for all councils can be found in the Northern Territory Grants Commission Annual Reports  – Schedule 1.

Annual reports can be found on the Territory Stories website.

The Northern Territory Grants Commission in assessing relative need for allocating general purpose funding uses the balanced budget approach to horizontally equalise based on the formula:

Assessed expenditure need - assessed revenue capacity = assessed equalisation requirement.

The general purpose funding methodology calculates standards by applying cost adjustors and average weightings to assess each local government's revenue raising capacity and expenditure need.  The assessment is the Northern Territory Grants Commission's measure of each local government's ability to function at the average standard in accordance with the National Principles.

Data collected through the Annual Financial Returns allows the Northern Territory Grants Commission to make an assessment of the income and expenditures of individual councils and to determine total income and expenditure of all local governments in the Northern Territory.  The Australian Bureau of Statistics, in its local government financial statistics and national accounts, also uses this data.