Purpose

To receive the revenue and capital budget monitor for the
third quarter of the 2023/24 financial year.

Decision

1. 
That a virement from
centrally held budgets to service directorates in respect of costs
of the additional Employer contributions to the Local Government
Pension Scheme, amounting to £0.7m be authorised.

 

2. 
That a one-off
virement from the Redundancy Reserve to Children’s Services
in respect of redundancies arising from the review of
Children’s Centres, amounting to £67k be
authorised.
 

3. 
That slippage of
£25.8m in the General Fund capital programme to 2024/25 be
authorised.
 
That it be noted that:
 

(a) 
The Council’s
forecast overspend at the end of Quarter 3 was £17.81m.
Overall this represented a further increase from the £8.2m
reported at the end of Quarter 2. The risk was therefore high that
the Council would be unable to balance its budget within the
Capitalisation Direction, unless it draws upon the Budget Smoothing
Reserve, other reserves and provisions and continued to take action
to reduce expenditure and increase income.

 

(b) 
The accounting
adjustments of £6.978m attributable to the Balance Sheet and
ledger reviews, and that these would mitigate the headline forecast
outturn, reducing it from £17.81m to £10.83m. At this
stage, no virements were being recommended until the end of the
financial year when further work is concluded.
 

(c) 
Service revenue
budgets were forecast to overspend by £21.3m in 2023/24.
There were Corporate overspends in respect of interest costs and
receipts (£2.3m) and the MRP of £3.2m. This was
balanced by an underspend on the Corporate Contingency budget
(£7.7m) and a number of other variances within the Corporate
budget amounting to £1.3m. Service and Corporate budgets
combined are showing an overspend of £17.81m prior to the
recommended virement of £6.98m.
 

(d) 
Medium Term Financial
Strategy Savings (MTFS) of £21.2m are expected to be
delivered in 2023/24 against planned savings of
£22.4m.
 

(e) 
That the Capital
programme was forecast to underspend in 2023/24 by £29.1m. Of
this, £25.8m was due to delayed starts on various projects
slippage and it is one of the recommendations of this report that
approval is granted to slip this to 2024/25.