Council encouraged to be “ruthless” on projected overspend

Finance bosses at Shropshire Council say they need to be “ruthless” to reign in the council’s spending position after early in-year projections made for “grim reading”.

A quarter one report released last week showed the council is currently facing a predicted overspend of around £38.5m for the current financial year, which would wipe out most of the authority’s reserves.

A council scrutiny committee today (September 9) recommended the cabinet looks at plans to further reduce the authority’s third party spending, with some councillors warning it would need to be “totally ruthless” in order to avoid drifting into the red.

“We’ve got to get our act together with getting these savings delivered and the spending down,” council finance portfolio holder Gwylim Butler told the committee.

“This [report] gives us a good front runner from the end of June to understand where this organisation is and hopefully will give us the time to pull it all back in.”

Bayston Hill, Column and Sutton councillor Rosemary Dartnall said the report made for “grim reading”, while Longden councillor Roger Evans said he was concerned the council’s budget was close to being out of balance.

“We seem to be drifting, drifting, drifting,” he said.

“The report shows the portfolio holders and their areas of finance, and every one of them is overspent, one of them by £14m. What are we doing at this council?”

Harlescott councillor Jeff Anderson added that the “immensely scary” prospect of overspend projections drifting further upwards would require a “ruthless” approach to cost cutting from the executive.

Earlier, Shropshire Council’s Assistant Director for Finance Ben Jay told the committee that some of the first quarter overspend figures related to delays in delivering savings as a result of them being “more complex” than anticipated.

He added that a savings delivery team has been created at the council to help identify potential cuts in service areas.

“Some savings are very simple to deliver, it’s a change to a low value contract and we can deliver it and it’s done,” he said.

“Other contracts are bigger, more complex or other service changes take a bit more time to put in place than has been anticipated; so some of the under delivery is to do with things taking longer than had been previously planned or being more complex than had previously been identified.”

Meanwhile, Shropshire Council head of finance James Walton warned cuts would impact on service delivery, adding: “I think ruthless is the correct word in relation to overseeing and ensuring that the financial position improves over the coming months.

“We don’t want this taken out of our hands, so I’d rather we were harder. But scrutiny needs to understand, members need to understand and the public needs to understand that there is a consequence of not spending that money.”