Agenda item

Report of the Cabinet Member Finance and Community Development (20 minutes)

The Chairman welcomed the Cabinet Member Finance and Community Development and the Group Accountant Martyn Scull, Group Accountant to the meeting.

The Cabinet Member introduced the report which had been circulated with the agenda. The report explained that during summer 2010 additional budget consultation was undertaken.  This consisted of 21 road shows in various venues across the town. Residents were asked to use sticky dots to identify services they thought should be ‘protected’, ‘reduced’ and ‘stopped’ and during this process over 21,000 sticky dots were used.  Residents found it easier to mark services to protect and reduce but much more difficult to mark those to stop.  Officers and Members had been able to answer most of the questions raised by residents.  “Back office” costs had been included in all of the costs shown as it was impossible to run services without them. 

This was not a scientific exercise but did engage the public. The two appendices showed the results from this consultation, ranked in order, one in chart form and one in a table with figures. 

The budget gap was £2.6million and he was now seeking the views of this committee on how the council should save money.

A member asked the Cabinet Member for his assessment of the current operational efficiency level of the council. In his view, this is where any commercial business would be looking to make savings. The Cabinet Member considered that the council was very efficient and in the order of 85%. By drilling down into individual departments and using approaches such as systems thinking, there was the potential to drive further efficiency savings and this must be a matter for ongoing review. However he stressed that the current budget would be ‘close to the bone’ and therefore they would be less scope for cuts in the future.

Members raised some concerns about the importance that the Cabinet would give to the results of the public consultation. With very little narrative given to the public, the views expressed were subjective and the nature of the consultation meant that they were self selecting.  

In response the Cabinet Member acknowledged that the council would get better at consultation. He stressed that the public had welcomed the opportunity to be consulted and the value of the consultation had been to highlight areas which needed to be looked at in more detail. The Council could then consider these with their additional awareness of priorities.

A member highlighted that changes in legislation regarding strategic planning and building control could enable the council to charge more for its services.

In response to a question from a member about the reliance on Strategic Commissioning to bridge the budget gap, the Cabinet Member confirmed that the medium-term financial strategy relied on the commissioning approach to drive down costs in finding new and appropriate ways to deliver services.

The chair concluded that the committee had mixed feelings about the value of the consultation but overall he thought it was a useful marketing exercise. He pointed out that the areas highlighted in the budget consultation for stopping or reducing services would only make a small contribution to the budget gap and therefore the council must be looking to reduce staffing costs and improve efficiency.  At this stage the committee had no information on this to comment any further.   

A member suggested that more effective scrutiny of the budget could be carried out if they received a quarterly update report. This was already produced for Cabinet.   

RESOLVED THAT the committee receive a quarterly budget monitoring report in the future