Issue - meetings

That the report be noted.         

The Corporate Finance Manager introduced a report to provide Members with the Revenue Budget Monitoring 2013/14 (Month 12) information for the Council Fund and Housing Revenue Account (HRA) which had been submitted to Cabinet on 17 June 2014. 

For the Council Fund, the projected net in-year expenditure was reported to be £3.152m less than budget, which was an increase of £0.937m on the £2.215m reported at Month 11. 

The movements related to three main areas as detailed in paragraph 3.02 of the report and the Corporate Finance Manager briefing explained the movements in relation to Community Services, Finance and Central & Corporate items. 

A number of carry forward requests had been reviewed during the month and had been identified as requiring carry forward into 2014/15.  The requests were detailed in Appendix 10 and the Corporate Finance Manager advised that the requests had been approved at Cabinet on 17 June 2014.  

Progress on the efficiencies included in the 2013/14 budget was detailed in paragraph 3.06, which currently indicated that £4.213m of the £5.331m (79%) would be achieved, resulting in a net under-achievement of £1.118m; the full details were provided in appendix 9.      

            On the issue of Non Standard price inflation, the Corporate Finance Manager explained that an amount of £0.036m remained unallocated and was included in the projected underspend within Central & Corporate.  Section 6 and appendix 7 provided details of the unearmarked reserves and indicated that the current projected level of the contingency reserve at the end of March 2014 was £5.093m.   

            The HRA was projected to have an overall underspend of £0.124m and a projected closing balance at Month 12 of £1.533m, which at 5.36% of total expenditure satisfied the prudent approach of ensuring a minimum level of 3%; full details of the significant variances in the HRA were included in appendix 8.  Within the Month 11 report, an amount of £0.085m was approved to be carried forward to fund software costs in relation to job scheduling and Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) hand held devices.  A further review in Month 12 had identified that the amount needed to be carried forward was £0.180m (£0.070m for PDAs and £0.110m for software). 

            Councillor Richard Jones referred to the underspend of £0.344m in Community Services and asked for details of the factors that had contributed to the figure and for information on what residents were being charged for.  The Finance Manager advised that the underspend was partly due to an increase in the number of self funding residents which meant that there had been an increase in the income received.  The Leader of the Council said that he was not aware of any changes to charges for residential services and that any future changes would be reported to the Committee.  Councillor Jones felt that a number of items that used to be paid for by the Council were now charged back to the residential homes and the charge passed on to the residents. 

RESOLVED:

That the report be noted.