Agenda item

Report of the Cabinet Member Finance and Assets

The Cabinet Member Finance and Assets presented the report, which would go on to full Council on 19^th July. After a decade of austerity, the council’s budget monitoring position had been solid, but then came another challenge in the form of Covid-19. A unique, innovative and ambitious response was required. During the first national lockdown, it was estimated that Covid would create a budget deficit for the council of £1.813m in 2020-21 through additional expenditure and income losses. Council therefore passed a recovery budget in November 2020, including a strategy to review assets for disposal in order to close the income gap. This budget made assumptions about how much the crisis would cost, with an ultimate underspend of £394k compared to this budget. Had the recovery budget not been passed, members would be discussing an enormous overspend at this meeting. Some of the underspend would be used to fund the first steps of a long-term, sustainable recovery for the town.

The Leader added that given the position local authorities found themselves in last year, it was remarkable to end up with an underspend. Income had been lost and things had slowed down, but no services had been cut. It was important to be careful about where this money was spent.

The Cabinet Member Finance and Assets thanked the finance team for their hard work.

The Leader moved to a vote, where it was unanimously:

RESOLVED THAT:

Council be recommended to:

1. Receive the financial outturn performance position for the General Fund, summarised at Appendix 2, and notes that in delivering services in 2020/21, there was an underspend of £394,663 against the recovery budget approved by Council in November 2020;
2. Notes £609,345 of carry forward approved by the Section 151 Officer under delegated powers at Appendix 5;
3. Approve the proposal for the use of the underspend after the carry forward requests outlined in Section 2.10 of this report and delegates authority to the Executive Director of Finance and Assets in consultation with the Lead Member for Finance and Assets to ensure the underspend it spent in line with this proposal;
4. Note the annual treasury management report at Appendix 7 and note the actual 2020/21 prudential and treasury indicators;
5. Note the capital programme outturn position as detailed in Appendix 8 and approve the carry forward of unspent budgets into 2021/22;
6. Note the year end position in respect of Section 106 and CIL agreements and partnership funding agreements at Appendix 9;
7. Note the outturn position in respect of collection rates for council tax and non-domestic rates for 2020/21 in Appendix 10;
8. Note the outturn position in respect of collection rates for sundry debts for 2020/21 in Appendix 11;
9. Receive the financial outturn performance position for the Housing Revenue Account for 2020/21 in Appendices 12 and 13 (as detailed in Section 11) and approves the carry forward of capital budgets in 2021/22 as set out in paragraph 11.9.