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Council gives mid-year revenue budget update

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On Wednesday, 20 November, Cabinet received an update on the mid-year revenue budget monitoring for 2024/2025.

Increasing demand and costs continue to have a significant impact on the provision of essential public services by all local authorities.

The mid-year forecasts suggest that the deficit on the Council's service budgets could be around £2.435m in 2024/2025. This is largely due to severe increases in the demand for and costs of Children's Social Care placements and Home to School Transport provision.

Subject to the final year-end position for 2024/25, this will be funded from one-off resources set aside by the Council to cover unfunded inflation and demand pressures, thereby ensuring that an overall balanced position can be reported.

The Council has implemented a range of actions to mitigate this impact, including controls on non-essential expenditure and continued close monitoring of service budgets.

Cllr Jayne Lonergan, Cabinet Member for Resources, said: "Our strong robust financial management has been instrumental in ensuring that essential services can continue to be delivered, despite the challenges we are also managing due to demand for our services increasing. Our approach and resilience to the changing situation has been pivotal to us being able to cope with the continued financial pressures.

"Unfortunately, in order to do this, we are having to use one-off resources which could be invested in growth and regeneration in the borough.

"The decade of cuts to local governmental funding from 2010 to 2020 under previous Governments left the local government sector significantly underfunded.

"We have been very clear that although the ideal solution is for the Government to increase the national level of funding, it's also important that funding is allocated based on need, it will be key that the Government allocates any available funding to where it is needed most."

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