This meeting was the third of a series of meetings for the council's Budget Scrutiny Task Group to discuss the Medium Term Financial Plan (MTFP) covering the period from 2025 to 2028. This meeting included a presentation about the Autumn 2024 budget and what it means for the council. The members were also scheduled to review the budgets for Adult Social Care and Public Health, as well as the budget for Children's Services.

Adult Social Care

The report pack for the meeting included details of the 2024/2025 Adult Social Care (ASC) budget and proposals for the 2025/2026 budget. The 2024/2025 budget is £122.115 million. Of that budget, £64 million comes directly from council revenue with the rest coming from a combination of income from the NHS, client income, and other government grants.

The proposals for the 2025/2026 budget include £7.05 million of efficiency savings. These include plans to continue the current prevention initiatives for a further 3 years, promoting the use of direct payments by residents to purchase their own care, and ongoing reviews of processes and ways of working. There are also a number of proposals for better management of services for people with mental health issues. These include working with Housing, Corporate Property and Development colleagues to s specialist accommodation offer by improving local extra care housing provision for service users with mental health needs. There are also plans to make savings in the way the service uses agency staff.

The proposals also identify £4.4 million of pressures, mostly from what the report describes as Demand and Complexity, as well as a projected increase in the number of residents with learning disabilities transitioning from children's services to adult social care.

Overall the net budget for Adult Social Care in 2025/2026 is projected to be £67.406 million.

The report pack also included information about some of the key issues and challenges facing Adult Social care, both locally and nationally. The report identifies underfunding as a key issue:

Underfunding of social care - £1.5bn funding gap identified following analysis of Fair Cost of Care exercise in 2022. Approx £196 p/w difference in what local authorities pay compared to actual costs. Providers are handing back contracts or exiting the market due to rising costs.

Children's Services

The report pack included information about the 2024/2025 budget for Children's Services, and proposals for the 2025/2026 budget.

The report identifies a number of financial and performance related issues for the service.

The key financial pressures for the service stem from a predicted shortfall in income from the NHS to cover the cost of placements for looked after children with a health need. There have been problems with the budgets for several years, but they are predicted to get significantly worse in 2025/26.

• Placements joint funded with Health- £1.400m: Funding for new placements with a health requirement have not been agreed by the ICB. A request for a judicial review of this has been submitted and the council is waiting on the court's decision.

The report states that the total budget for Children's Services in 2024/2025 is £165.219 million.

The report authors propose a range of savings for the 2025/2026 budget. These include £0.725 million of savings from demand management by reducing costs of care by reducing the length of care proceedings and increasing independent travel training and local school places to reduce costs of SEND transport. Further savings are proposed from utilising artificial intelligence, building new care leaver accommodation, making staff savings, and reducing the council's half term activity and food programme.

Overall the report projects a net budget of £47.694 million for Children's Services in 2025/2026.

The report also identifies that the performance of Children's Services is strong, despite the financial challenges:

Performance in children’s social care is strong. The borough has less children in need than would be expected for the level of FSM and a lower number of LAC ¹ per 10,000 population (55.9) than statistical neighbours (61.6), inner London (64.0) and nationally (70.0).

Public Health

The report pack contains information about the Public Health budget. This budget is mostly made up of ringfenced grants from central government, meaning the council has very little control over how the money is spent. There is also information about the Voluntary Community Sector budget, which is comparatively much smaller at less than £1 million per year.