Treasury refreshes the manual behind the UK's consolidated balance sheet
Victoria Shinder2 min readHM Treasury updated its preparers' pack for the 2025-26 Whole of Government Accounts on 22 September 2026. The collection was first published on 30 June 2026; this is a revision to it, not a new document.
What sits behind the link is a working kit rather than a policy statement: user guidance for the WGA Data Collection Tool in two separate editions — 161 pages for central government, 143 for local government — and a documentation mapping spreadsheet for each. Every file carries the department's standard notice that it may not suit users of assistive technology, with a route to request an accessible version.
What it means
Whole of Government Accounts is the UK's attempt to consolidate several thousand public bodies — departments, agencies, the NHS, local authorities, public corporations — into one set of accounts prepared on commercial accounting principles. It is the only place where the state's balance sheet appears in a form an auditor of a company would recognise, and it is where liabilities that the headline fiscal aggregates handle differently — pensions, PFI, clinical negligence provisions — are carried at a measured value.
That is why a 161-page tool guide is not the clerical detail it looks like. A consolidation is only as good as the mapping that gets thousands of differently-kept ledgers onto one chart of accounts, and the mapping lives in exactly these spreadsheets. Changes here propagate into what the eventual published accounts say, and they do it silently.
The other reason to log it is the calendar. WGA is published years in arrears and the lag has been the standing criticism of it. Guidance for the 2025-26 cycle being revised in September 2026 is the machinery for that cycle moving on schedule; it says nothing about when the accounts themselves will appear, and we are not inferring a date from it.