Agenda item

The report presents the revenue and capital outturn for 2017/18, highlighting a net revenue over budget position of £1.255m after allowing for proposed carry forwards.  The report refers to requests to carry forward specific revenue budget items to 2018/19 and to write-off revenue over budgets where recovery in future years would have an adverse impact on continuing service delivery.  The report also refers to requests to re-phase specific capital budget items to 2018/19 and to remove net capital underspends.

Councillor Dine Romero made an ad-hoc comment about overspend in Adult Social Care and asked the Cabinet to lobby the Government for more funding in this area.

Councillor Will Sandry made an ad-hoc statement where he expressed his concerns on capital programme delivery.  Councillor Sandry said that the Council had started a number of big projects yet there was no delivery required.

Councillor Robin Moss made an ad-hoc statement where he also expressed his concerns on overspend in Adult Social Care and that the Council had reached a financial cliff edge in support services.  Councillor Moss also asked the Leader to lobby the Government for more funding in Adult and Social Care.

Councillor Paul May introduced the item by thanking the officers and Councillor Charles Gerrish on the report.  Councillor May added that this report had presented the revenue and capital outturn for 2017/18, highlighting a net revenue over budget position of £1.255m after allowing for proposed carry forwards. The position had vastly improved through the management actions that were agreed and implemented earlier in the financial year. The improvement had continued since the last report, which forecasted an over budget position of £3.396m based on monitoring for the year to December 2017, mainly due to lower cost of Children’s placements and improved income in Adult Social Care.

The report had referred to requests to carry forward specific revenue budget items to 2018/19 and to write-off revenue over budgets where recovery in future years would have an adverse impact on continuing service delivery. Budgets were also rebased for 2018/19 to realign them. It was proposed that the over budget position was funded by appropriate drawdowns from the mitigations set aside earlier in the financial year that were held as contingency against in year spending pressures. This included the use of the specific transitional grant funding provided by the government and set aside by the Council at the start of the financial year.

The main areas of over/under budget (greater than £1m) were:

• Adult Care, Health & Wellbeing – £1.148m over budget - The overspend related to continued pressure on Adult Social care spend arising from demographic change, with increasing levels of complexity and acuity of need impacting on the cost of individual packages of care / placements, despite enhanced control measures.
• Children & Young People - £1.534m over budget - The overspend relates to demand driven pressures mainly relating to children's social care placement costs due to a significant increase in expenditure for supporting individual children, in particular, the support for residential placements, support for fostered (including independent fostering) and court directed parent and baby placements, along with direct payments for clients at risk of care and inter-agency adoption placements.

Councillor Paul May moved the recommendations.

Councillor Mark Shelford seconded the motion.

Councillor Vic Pritchard said that it was not a shock to the Cabinet about the Adult Care, Health and Wellbeing overspends.  The Cabinet had lobbied the Government, and it would continue to lobby though, the Council should be more independent and efficient no matter what funding comes from the Government.

The Chair said that he had lobbied the Government for more funding, as had the other Councils across the country.

RESOLVED (unanimously) that the Cabinet agreed to:

1)  Notes the revenue budget outturn over budget of £1.255m (including carry forwards) for 2017/18 and the funding mitigations used;

2)  Approves the carry forward requests outlined in paragraphs 5.5;

3)  Approves that all over budgets are written-off as an exception to the Budget Management Rules for 2017/18.

4)  Notes the revenue virements for 2017/18 reported for information in Appendix 2(i)

5)  Notes the reserve positions and the use of flexible capital receipts shown in paragraphs 5.15-5.17;

6)  Notes the outturn position of the 2017/18 capital programme in paragraph 5.23, and the funding outlined in paragraph 5.25;

7)  Notes the further use of CIL funding in 2017/18 outlined in paragraph 5.26;

8)  Approves the capital rephasing and write-off of net underspends as listed in Appendix 3. This reflects the outturn spend position on projects against final budgets as detailed in Appendix 4(ii).