Issue - meetings

Revenue Budget Monitoring 2014/15 (Month 4)

Meeting: 09/10/2014 - Corporate Resources Overview & Scrutiny Committee (Item 33)

33 Revenue Budget Monitoring 2014/15 (Month 4) and Capital Programme Monitoring 2014/15 (Month 4) pdf icon PDF 22 KB

Additional documents:

Decision:

            That the reports be noted.  

 

Minutes:

            Revenue Budget Monitoring 2014/15 (Month 4)

 

                        The Chief Officer (People and Resources) introduced a report to provide Members with the latest Revenue Budget Monitoring 2014/15 (Month 4) for the Council Fund and Housing Revenue Account which was to be submitted to Cabinet on 16 October 2014. 

 

                        For the Council Fund, the projected net in year non pay expenditure was forecast to be £0.019m lower than budget.  Extensive work had been undertaken to rebase all workforce budgets to reflect the actual new costs arising from the new pay and grading structure following the implementation of Single Status.  Due to the continuation of this significant piece of work, no pay variations were included in the report.  It was anticipated that the rebasing work would be concluded in time for the next monitoring report. 

 

The variances of £0.622m between months 3 and 4 were detailed in appendix 1 and consisted of an overall net reduction in Social Services, an increase in the anticipated surplus on the Council Tax Collection Fund and variances totalling £0.241m in Central and Corporate Finance.  Section 3.05 detailed the efficiencies and it was currently projected that £8.444m of the £8.84m (96%) would be achieved.  It was reported in paragraph 3.06 that a significant efficiency was included within the Functional Value for Money targets for the administrative support across the organisation.  This was subject to further review and though currently assumed as achievable, it remained an additional risk.  The 2014/15 budget also contained £3.1m of workforce efficiencies.  The Chief Officer (People and Resources) explained that an initial Voluntary Redundancy Programme had identified a number of efficiencies and a second programme had commenced on 1 September 2014 and was running alongside the next phase of the Management Review.  A full analysis was included in appendix 3. 

 

                        Section 4 detailed the inflation included in the budget and section 5 included the budget assumptions and risks.  It was reported that taking into account amounts needed to be used from the unearmarked reserves and the current projected outturn at month 4, the projected balance on the contingency reserve at 31 March 2015 was £2.960m and this was summarised in appendix 4. 

 

                        The HRA was projected to have an overall underspend of £0.038m and a projected closing balance at Month 4 of £1.203m which at 4% of total expenditure satisfied the prudent approach of ensuring a minimum level of 3%. 

 

                        Councillor Richard Jones referred to the changes in the way the Budget Monitoring information had been reported which included much less detail in the  table for the Council Fund latest forecast.  Earlier reports had included the original budget which this report did not.  He also said that non-pay expenditure had not been included as a risk for this period which he felt was a concern and he asked that both of these elements be included in future reports to allow for transparency and easier understanding.  The Chair commented that the detail was included in appendix 1 to the report.  Councillor Jones also felt that the  ...  view the full minutes text for item 33