University financial health check 2017: future prospects?

There appear to be two errors in this article concerning unrestricted reserves. Firstly, as HEFCE points out, they "are the accumulated surpluses of an institution over its lifetime and are not the same as cash, although an institution could dispose of an asset if it was surplus to operational requirements (thereby converting it to cash)." The majority of these assets are likely to be buildings and hard to "convert to cash" in a hurry. Therefore it is not correct to state, as you do, that these reserves are "the amount of surplus money it has built up and is able to spend on whatever it decides." That would be (depending on your precise definition) either cash or current assets, both of which in most cases will be substantially smaller than unrestricted reserves. Secondly, your graph of unrestricted reserves in the sector seems somewhat incorrect, given that it appears to give Southampton reserves of around £3bn. HEFCE again make clear that "Reserves are an HEI’s total assets less its liabilities", i.e. its net assets, and your table linked to in this article gives Southampton's net assets at the considerably smaller figure of £467m. HEFCE link here: http://www.hefce.ac.uk/pubs/year/2017/201702/

Will there be an updated version of this report produced this year?