Issue - meetings

The attached report presents the financial monitoring information for the Authority as a whole for the financial year 2023/24, using information available as at the end of June 2023.

Cllr Mark Elliott introduced the report, moved the officer recommendation and made the following statement:

“Rather than being a backward-looking report, this one is giving the current, in-year position compared against this year's budget.  It's designed to give an early review of budget performance using the first two months of financial data.  This is to help us identify budget risks early.

I mentioned in previous reports the national Tory government's inability to get inflation under control, and UK Inflation (CPI) is still proving very stubborn - holding at around 8.7% - which is obviously affecting the cost of delivering Council services.

To cover the easy topic first, the 2023/24 Capital Programme is a forecast of £92.8m against a budget of £95.0m - so a small underspend. Whilst we want to see our capital programme proceeding according to plan, I don't think there is anything of serious concern here.

With regard to the Revenue Budget, the current forecast to the end of the year has identified above budget pressures of £3.96m.  For context that's against an overall revenue budget of just over £135m - so just shy of 3% over budget.  Whilst 3% might not sound like a lot, this is in the first two months of the financial year - there is absolutely no room for complacency and we, the whole cabinet, need to be working to bring this back in line as quickly as possible. 

The major part of the overage is down to the continuing pressure on Children’s services which makes up £3.3m of the forecast budget pressure.  This is a national problem being faced by all councils across the country - central government simply isn't providing enough funding into the system to cope with the constantly rising pressures in this area.

There are also workforce pressures across Council services which is creating a reliance on higher cost agency staff and we need to reduce that reliance as quickly as possible.

On the up side, we have seen good income performance across our corporate budgets and chargeable services that is helping to mitigate some of the rising costs in other areas.

I don't want to be too gloomy - identifying the issue this early in the financial year is a really good thing. I know the council's leadership team are now working on financial recovery plans to bring us back into budget, this will be reported back to Cabinet as part of our Quarter 2 monitoring.  I urge all cabinet colleagues to continue to work closely with their senior directors and other senior leaders over the coming couple of months to quickly identify, and then monitor, mitigation plans for your individual portfolios. Whilst we're seeing particular pressures in one portfolio, getting the budget back on track is something for us all to pull together to resolve.

I'll finish with thanks again to officers both in the finance dept and across the council. We have a great team and I'd like to thank them for their efforts in less-than-ideal  ...  view the full minutes text for item 16