Issue - meetings

Councillor Schmid introduced the report which reflected two key areas of budget pressures; one was related to Covid-19 and had a much larger overspend.

The Government, at the early stages of the pandemic, had appealed to all Councils to spend whatever necessary as they would be fully compensated by the Government. Unfortunately, that was not the case and their latest announcement was that there would be no compensation on the first £5 million of lost income and beyond that only 75% of lost income would be compensated. This was not a loss any Local Government could afford, especially after 10 years of austerity and cuts.

Councillor Schmid thanked the finance team for producing the three finance papers on this agenda. He specially thanked Emily Hill, who took over from Hitesh Jolapara as Director of Finance in the middle of the pandemic and was doing a fantastic job steering the Council through this very difficult time.

The Leader stated that it had been 10 years since David Cameron and Nick Clegg had introduced austerity in Local Government and he could not stress enough the financial pressure this had caused in council budgets across the country to continue to provide services. He thanked Councillor Schmid, the financial team and the whole senior leadership team for cutting spends while ensuring services were delivered efficiently.

The Leader added that if the Government changes to planning regulations went ahead, it would damage the ability for councils to have any infra structure funding to mitigate issues caused by new schemes and that would be another tremendous hit to all councils.

The Leader put the recommendations to the vote.

AGREED UNANIMOUSLY BY CABINET:

1.     To note General Fund forecast overspend as of May of £18.807m and requirement for urgent further action to significantly reduce the forecast overspend.

2.     To note the Housing Revenue underspend of £0.181m.

3.     To note the in-year Dedicated Schools Grant overspend of £2.179m.

4.     To approve General Fund virements of £1.960m as detailed in appendix 9.