Looking at next years' budget

This week for me has been dominated by the budget, which always happens during the autumn term. Having said that it was punctuated by an excellent evening on Tuesday with the officers and soldiers of 21 Signal Regiment at Azimghur Barracks, North Collerne where I watched their beating retreat ceremony and we were entertained by the very impressive Band of the Brigade of Gurkhas. The army always do this so well.

Yesterday I met with all of the leaders, managers and team leads in the services which I manage to update them on the key corporate work, our performance position (strong) and budget (under pressure). We also had two excellent presentations from Sarah Butler and Laura Symons on Information Governance (a very important subject that belies the title) and John Rogers & Ian Baker on digital change and how it will impact on our services over the next few years. More on both of these anon.

Back to the budget. As at period 4 (end of July) this year we are currently projecting a potential year end overspend of around £8m (2.5% of our net budget). We have to get this under control to finish the year on balance so Carolyn and I have implemented two immediate actions. We will freeze all recruitment unless this is in areas of health and safety and protection for vulnerable people. Any other recruitment will need a conversation with us to determine the impact of the freeze. Secondly, we have reduced all service budgets by 1.5% for the remainder of the year. This achieves the balanced position and ADs are identifying the corresponding trade-offs in performance and work which will need to stop to achieve this.

Next years’ budget is just as tough. We have to reduce net expenditure by £13m to off-set the government’s reduction in our Revenue Support Grant coupled with the increased demand in key services such as children’s social care, adult social care and waste management. We have currently identify potential savings of £9m and continue to work on the gap to close. The good news is that we are 3 months ahead of where we were last year with this task and the senior management team are working very well together to tackle this.

Your ideas on how we meet these challenges are very important to us. Please share any thoughts you have in these areas directly with Carolyn and I.  

Speak again soon. For daily updates, discussion, personal opinion, comment or just to connect or keep in touch you can follow me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/#!/drcarltonbrand.

Carlton