Agenda item

To receive a report from Fay Hammond, Director of Finance

RECEIVED a Budget Progress Update from Fay Hammond, Director of Finance.

NOTED:

·         The purpose of the report was to update the Overview & Scrutiny Committee on the progress and timetable in setting the Council’s budget.

·         The budget is set in the context of ensuring the council is financially resilient.

·         The budget gap as set out in Cabinet is set at £18m, to date £15.6m of savings have been identified.

·         Officers continue to work on options for savings in preparation for finalising the budget in February 2019. A key feature of the savings is to ensure that these are ambitious but achievable.

·         The budget consultation is now underway and the results of this will be reported at the Overview & Scrutiny Budget meeting on 31January 2019.

·         It is imperative that Enfield’s budget is financially robust to address a number of issues including future funding uncertainty – in 2020/21 the national funding system for all councils will change, the settlement information will not be available until autumn 2019.

·         The approach to balancing the budget for 2019/20 and future years will take the form of six work streams focused on the Council’s services.

·         Each workstream has been set with challenging targets to identify savings, with weightings applied to recognise the difficulties demand led services such as Children’s Services will face in finding savings from stretched budgets.

·         A series of three Member budget challenge sessions have been set up in November with the administration (Resources, Chief Executive, Place, People). The purpose of these sessions is to provide additional scrutiny to the savings process.

·         The Executive Management team also meet every week to review the budget. This takes a collaborative approach which works well.

·         2018/19 overspends will be considered as part of the 2019/20 budget.

·         Information was provided on the reserves levels and Fay advised Members that if the budget issues are not addressed and savings found, reserves will run out by March 2020.

The following questions and comments were made:

Q.        Does the £18m target incorporate some of the savings that should have been found this year?

A.        The £18m is a true figure and by February 2019 the budget will be balanced.

Q.        With regards to fairer funding both parties fully support what the council is doing regarding representation to the Government. However, how confident are you that the formula will be revised in our favour?

A.        The pressure we have is the County Councils are marketing very hard in being the poor relations to London Councils. Although lobbying for fairer funding will continue we are not expecting the Government to award additional money to London as a whole.

Fay concluded by advising Members that the current focus remains for Officers to continue to work on options to close the 2019-20 budget gap. For 2020+, the work will start as soon as the budget for 2019-20 is agreed.

The Chair thanked Fay for her informative update and the Committee looked forward to hearing the results of the budget consultation at its meeting in January 2019.