Agenda item

The 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 September 2023.

Cllr Mark Elliott introduced the report and made the following statement:

“Rather than looking further ahead as the previous report did, this report sets out the in-year position. I.e. how are we doing in reality compared to budget this year.

Our revenue budget is currently predicted to be £6.5m over-spent.  For context, that’s about 2% of our revenue budget which is roughly £300m.  By far the main reason for this is the pressures in social care, Children’s Services alone coming in at £4.58m over budget.  The report sets out financial performance by portfolio, so people can see a breakdown of where the pressures are, with an accompanying narrative.  As Cabinet colleagues will be well aware, we are in the process of taking urgent recovery action across the council to make sure that position is brought back in line.

We are implementing vacancy management, which means holding a period where we do not recruit on roles that are not essential in meeting our statutory duties, for a temporary period to help reduce our monthly pay costs.

We have introduced corporate controls where we are utilising our financial systems to enable additional scrutiny over new contract expenditure that could be challenged and reduced or delivered in different and more cost-effective ways. 

We are pausing and reducing spending in discretionary areas including non-essential training, conferences, travel and subscriptions.

I hope everyone will agree these are reasonable and proportionate measures to take to make sure we land in a balanced position at the end of the financial year.

On the capital side we are actually forecasting to underspend this year by just over £30m pounds, mainly due to projects being re-phased into future years. Remembering what I said about the hard split between capital and revenue spending, that doesn’t mean we have £30m extra to spend elsewhere! The effect is really just to delay some borrowing, but that does have a small benefit on the revenue side in that it means our borrowing costs – effectively our interest bill – are a little lower.

I propose we accept the recommendations set out in items 2.1 to 2.4 of the report.”

Cllr Matt McCabe seconded the report and highlighted the failure of central government to adequately support local authorities.  The rest of the financial year is going to be challenging.  The Council has statutory duties which it must deliver and there are insufficient funds to do this.  The report outlines the actions being taken to balance the budget, but the next few months will be tough.

Cllr Paul May made the following statement:

“Sadly, the Children’s Services budget pressures continue to be a major concern for this council as for many local authorities.

The report clearly highlights the budgetary pressures, including the Conservative government allocating Unaccompanied Asylum-Seeking Children to the authority with insufficient funding to cover the cost. Many are just below the age of 18 when they enter the system but if the Home Office does not approve their asylum case, they remain in the care system and councils retain statutory responsibility for their care up to the age of 25. Many are not actually local residents as the government quite rightly shares the responsibility amongst all local authorities – this leads to additional transport, care and living costs. These young people deserve to be treated with compassion and good care. It is not only the lack of funding but the pressure on limited resources that we have for our services such as supported lodging involved.

As a service the original budget contained a commitment to save £1.2m and further in year savings of a further £1m are scheduled to be achieved. We are doing what we can to deal with the enormous pressures of increases in numbers and complexity.

We are also dependent on the highly expensive independent out of area providers.

We will produce a longer-term strategic plan for further approaches to seek ways for containing those pressures as soon as possible.

Other local authorities are suffering from similar pressures and sadly the Conservative government does not offer the help we all need. These are vulnerable children and overspends add to budget pressures on other services B&NES provides across the whole council.”

RESOLVED (unanimously):

(1)  To note the 2023/24 revenue budget position (as at the end of September 2023).

(2)  To note the revenue virements listed for information in Appendix 3(i) of the report.

(3)  To note the capital year-end forecast detailed in paragraph 3.26 of the report.

(4)  To note the changes in the capital programme, including capital schemes, that have been agreed for full approval under delegation listed in Appendix 4(i) of the report.