Herefordshire council budget measures attacked

Measures to address Herefordshire’s forecast £13.5 million overspend this year have been branded inadequate by opposition leaders.

At a cabinet meeting on September 29, member for finance Coun Stoddart said the council’s reserves have declined from £114.7 million in 2021, to £106.1 million in 2022 to the present £91.4 million, “due to the requirement to provide additional funding for children’s services”.

A report for the meeting warned that even if an agreed £4 million savings package succeeds, Herefordshire Council will overspend its budget by £9.5 million this year.

Independents for Herefordshire group leader Coun Liz Harvey, the council’s previous head of finance who now chairs its scrutiny management board, said: “We are halfway through the financial year and yet a delivery plan [for how savings will be achieved] has not been published even in draft.”

Council leader Coun Jonathan Lester said this was “in progress”.

Green group leader Coun Ellie Chowns said: “There is no fat left on the bone after a lack of central government funding for more than a decade.”

She said that figures such as “savings in community wellbeing” in the council’s budget “sound quite dry, but they add up to further cuts to services for people who are really struggling”.

The children’s services overspend was due in part to thye Government failing to address the “chronic lack” of social workers nationally, she added.

She challenged councillors Lester and Stoddart to join her in writing to local government secretary Michael Gove urging him to address these points – to which Coun Lester said: “If you’ll share that letter I’ll read it and consider it.”

Liberal Democrat leader Coun Terry James said that with the council having already used around £10 million of its reserves to balance its budget in the previous financial year, “we can soon get to a point where we haven’t any reserves”.

On he proposal to recruit more full-time social workers, he said: “We’ve been saying we’ll cut agency numbers for ten years, but they are still subject to the same incentives.”

True Independents leader Coun Bob Matthews said council cuts “will result in the public getting a poor, indeed worsening, service”.

“It’s time we ran this authority more along stringent business lines, and cut out the waste and incompetence,” he said.