Agenda item

Community Services Budget Monitoring Update

To consider the report.

Decision:

The committee received a presentation from Chris Hall, Executive Director of Community Services, and Paul Matravers, Lead Specialist – Finance, on the current budget position, the overspend in the overall council budget and the particular challenges of bringing the previous councils into one unitary budget. A discussion followed.

The committee thanked the officers for the report and noted it.

 

Minutes:

A presentation was given by Chris Hall, Executive Director of Community Services, and Paul Matravers, Lead Specialist – Finance, on the current budget position, the overspend in the overall council budget and the particular challenges of bringing the previous councils into one unitary budget.

During the discussion, the following points were raised and responded to:

  • Are the variances in this budget an unusual situation when councils are brought together under unitary? No. The variance is made up of overspending and bringing in less money than anticipated, due to issues with the budgets of the previous authorities.
  • Where are the decisions around cuts, or does the data still need further cleaning? When will that process be completed and a final figure available? The anticipated income that was included in budgets from previous councils needs to be financed with cuts to expenditure in other areas. There was also expenditure that wasn’t factored into previous councils budgets that now needs to be funded. These are budget anomalies, that will only be a problem for this financial year for the unitary authority.
  • Where there is a clear mistake such as this in the budget setting process, what are the options for resolving it? Because budgets were set on the expectation of those incomes and expenditures, they have to be balanced in order to cover the anomalies found. Bringing 5 budgets together requires understanding the decision making by legacy councils. It becomes easier after 12 months, and this is an issue across the council, not just in Communities. They will be corrected by the 24/25 financial year.
  • What kind of time scale is there to bring savings to Scrutiny? The overspend in adults means that we need to not just balance the budget but underspend. The financial control boards put in place as part of the financial emergency are working on reducing the expenditure. There won’t be specific proposals on reducing expenditure for this budget. For next year, specific proposals will go to Corporate and Resources Scrutiny in February, then Executive, then Full Council.
  • Would savings made through not recruiting show in the data we have been given? Yes, but the goal is simply to get balanced at this point.
  • It would be useful to committee members to be kept aware of areas of underspending in Communities, as we will notice the impact of that on our constituents and it will be useful to have awareness of that in our conversations with them. The Month 9 report which will come to the committee in February we will see the results of the financial emergency spending boards and we are hoping at that point we will see a reduction in variance.
  • How are the decisions that the spending board makes shown in the budget? Will the committee get information on decisions rejected by the board? We will look at how that can be reported. Eventually the figures will be reflected in the budget sheet. The spending board also leads to self-policing, as there are fewer requests for spending since the likelihood of it being rejected is high. Those savings are hard to track as it is more preventative.
  • The position of this year’s budget and next year are interlinked. We need to set the 24/25 Budget before we will have the final figures for this year. How close do we need to get so that we are prepared for next year, and what level of certainty can we have? Budget monitoring is a prediction, and we don’t know how bad the winter is going to be. Everyone is doing what they can to cover the current whole council overspend of £18.7m, but we may need to cover some of that from reserves. It will be clearer how much it will be in month 9, but we won’t know until the end of March.
  • Parish councils are concerned, as they need to set their precepts earlier than the council sets its budget. Finding a final position is important.
  • The combination of LGR and the financial emergency have been a particular challenge with timing – Other LGRs have not done budget monitoring until they reached month 6.
  • Of the £1.3m overspend in Communities, £900,000 is caused by LGR discrepancies out of our control. What is the global figure for discrepancies like this? We don’t have a global figure. Adults and Childrens do not have these as their budgets have continued under the same authority. When we set the budget for 24/25 we will have a lot more knowledge and all the discrepancies will have been removed.

 

The committee thanked the officers for the report and noted it.

 

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