Asset Management & Commercialisation, Finance, & Ascot

This report details the forecast outturn against budget for the 2022/23 financial year as at the end of November (Month 8). It includes the revenue and capital budgets along with the forecast financial reserve position at year end.

Cabinet considered the report detailing the forecast outturn against budget for the 2022/23 financial year as at the end of November (Month 8). It included the revenue and capital budgets along with the forecast financial reserve position at year end.

Councillor Hiton, Cabinet Member for Asset Management & Commercialisation, Finance, & Ascot moved the recommendations advising the meeting that the impact of actions reported in Month 6 was reducing the reported overspend from £1.3M to £934K which was an improvement of £363K. He stated that when taking account of contingency and funding changes the forecast outturn was an underspend of just over £1.3M.

Councillor Hilton thanked the senior management team for taking a collective responsibility for the Councils finances which had resulted in the reducing projected overspend and he continued to be optimistic that, without the use of contingency, the Council would deliver a balanced budget by the year end. He added that this would be for a fourth year in a row.

Councillor Hilton highlighted a few of the variances within the report:

·       Adults & Housing were forecasting an overspend of £948K, an adverse variance from month 6 of £452K largely due to Adult Social Care. He noted that the forecast outturn relied upon the use of one-off funds. He repeated his previous observation that this overspend was mainly due to the cost of support for an increased number of older people placed into residential care as a result of the of the pandemic. Although hospitals were provided with funds to free up beds by moving patients into residential care an unintended consequence was the cost of their care passes to the Council and unfortunately once in care, they were unlikely to return to their homes. The directorate was implementing a series of actions to manage this overspend down.

·       The Place directorate reported a favourable variance of £774K reducing the projected overspend to £662K. Parking income continued to increase and was now at 96% of the profiled budget. He reflected that if parking was a lead indicator of the state of the local economy then this was good news for retail sales.

·       Overspend on Children’s service was unchanged at £255K. He was pleased to report that the Deficit Management Plan and AfC’s participation with the DfE Delivering Better Value in SEND support programme had reduced the deficit in the dedicated school grant by nearly £200k. 

·       The Resources and Governance, law and strategy directorates had reported a £900K positive variance.

Councillor Hilton advised that in year savings were forecast to underdeliver by £515K but that contingency had been included in the budget to manage any shortfall. He emphasised the volatility in the provision of Council services with the withdrawal of a commercial bus route and the unplanned influx of immigrant children. He commended the ability of officers and his Cabinet colleagues to manage such surprises.

Councillor Hilton reported that just 2% of Capital schemes had yet to start and that the Vicus Way carpark was operational and delivered within budget. The cost of the capital programme was £60.9M but further slippages were anticipated which would reduce interest rate costs.

He explained further detail on the two virements for consideration by Cabinet were shown in table 12 on page 46 of the agenda report. The virements related to:

·       a change in practice which required Achieving for Children to invoice public health for contributions would enable the Director of Public Health to have greater oversight of how allocations of Public Health grant to Children’s services was being deployed.

·       the non-staff budgets which took longer to disaggregate following the restructure of the transformation team across departments.

Councillor McWilliams arrived at the meeting at 19:12.

Councillor Johnson, Leader of the Council seconded the recommendations commenting that he was pleased to see the overspends being reduced, underspends being taken into account and noted that the rising revenue for car parks was bringing the Council within sight of where they had wanted to be.

Councillor Rayner commended the Finance team and the Council for the current financial position stating that it demonstrated a strong steer. She noted that whilst she was pleased to see 117 Ukrainians supported within the borough it did cause extra financial strain. She commented that the allowances for host was increasing from £350 to £500 at a time when the tariff was reducing but the Council was delighted to have Ukrainian people living here.

RESOLVED UNANIMOUSLY that

i)               the report be noted;

ii)             the forecast revenue outturn for the year be noted as an overspend on services of £0.934m which reduced to an underspend of £1.329m when considering unallocated contingency budgets and changes to funding budgets (para 4.1 of the agenda report);

iii)           two budget virements (para 12) be approved; and

iv)           the forecast capital outturn be noted as expenditure of £60.945m against a budget of £76.121m (para 14 of the agenda report).