Issue - meetings

To scrutinise the revenue and capital proposals relating to the 2024/25 Draft Budget and the Medium Term Financial Strategy (MTFS) for 2024/25 to 2028/29. This covers budget items under the remit of the Overview & Scrutiny Committee including part of Culture, Strategy & Engagement and part of Environment & Resident Experience.

Appendix 1 – Scrutiny Role

Appendix 2 – Cabinet report – Budget and MTFS (5^th December 2023)

Appendix 3 – MTFS Savings Tracker – Q2 2023/24

Appendix 4 – New Revenue Growth Proposals

Appendix 5 – New Revenue Savings Proposals

Appendix 6 – Draft Capital Programme

The Committee received a report which set out the draft General Fund (GF) Budget for 2024/25; the Medium Term Financial Strategy (MTFS) 2024/29; the draft HRA Budget 2024/25 and its draft Business Plan including estimated income (funding) and expenditure adjustments, as well as the draft capital programmes for both funds.

The Vice Chair for this Committee highlighted that this meeting would focus on all other areas of the Council that had not been scrutinised through the panels, which included Culture, Strategy & Engagement, Resident experience, Corporate, Legal & Governance and Finance.

The report was introduced by Frances Palopoli, Head of Corporate Financial Strategy & Monitoring as set out in the agenda pack at pages 51-130.

The following was raised in the discussion of this item:

a)    Forecasts outlined an overspend of £3.6m for this financial year and this was predominantly due to inflation and the current level of interest rates.

b)    The Committee sought clarification around whether fixed interest rates at the time of borrowing was reflected in the overspend figures presented in the report. The Committee was advised that the increase in interest rates that had occurred was a result of refinancing and new borrowings and did not incur from existing borrowings made in the previous years.

c)    In response to a question regarding the ongoing issue of agency staffing, the Committee noted that this issue had been ongoing for a while despite efforts to reduce the number of agency staff being employed. Reducing the number of agency staff had been challenging as there were pressures on certain areas where it had been difficult to recruit full time staff into certain roles. In order to tackle this issue, all Directors had been tasked to produce data on the number of agency staff and a possible end date for each worker. In addition, a quarterly meeting was held with the Directors to discuss this further and to ensure that Directors were actively working to encourage the reduction of agency staffing. The Committee noted that these quarterly meetings had been successful as the number of agency staff had reduced substantially.

d)    The Committee was advised that in the Community Safety service, there was an underspend of around £29,000 in salaries budget for vacancies. In the ASB Enforcement team, there was an underspend of around £76,000 in relation to vacancies that were being held within the service. The majority of the underspend related to the actual Waste Management Client and Contract budget which was under spending by £430,000 and the main component of that was from the rebate that the Council would get from Veolia in relation to pensions contribution.

e)    The Committee sough clarification regarding pressures within Digital Services. Officers advised that the main pressures were around IT contracts as many of the contacts were priced in other currencies, such as dollars and as a result the exchange rates were high. General inflation was also a contributing factor. Another pressure within Digital Services was around organisational changes. The cost of running the business had  ...  view the full minutes text for item 8