Purpose

Quarterly report

Content

Cabinet received a report on the
forecast Revenue and Capital outturn position for Buckinghamshire
Council for the financial year 2023/24 as at Quarter 3.  The Council continued to experience significant
financial pressures due to continued increase in demand and
complexity of need in key services, such as Adults Social Care and
Children’s Social Care. The forecast revenue outturn position
at Quarter 3 was an adverse variance of £4.5m, (1% of
Portfolio budgets), a reduction of £4.1m from the Quarter 2
reported position of £8.6m. The adverse variance
remained primarily due to pressures in Health and Wellbeing and
Education and Children’s Services from demand and market
insufficiency issues, coupled with pressures in Housing and
Homelessness & Regulatory Services in Temporary Accommodation
budgets and Transport budgets.
 
At
Quarter 1, an adverse variance of £8.3m had been reported,
and action plans were formulated in order to contain pressures as
much as possible. The Quarter 2 budget monitoring report provided
an update on these measures and reflected positive movements across
several Portfolios linked to the delivery of action plans. The
overall forecast at Quarter 2 deteriorated due to increasing
pressures within Education and Children’s Services. Between
Quarter 2 and Quarter 3 the Council had additionally developed
enhanced spending and vacancy controls to further contain the
overall budget pressure and these were detailed in the main
report.
 
Within the overall position there was an adverse variance of
£13.6m (3%) in Portfolios (£15.2m last quarter) offset
by a £9.1m (£6.6m last quarter) favourable variance in
Corporate & Funding.  The Capital
Programme had been updated for proposed Quarter 3 Budget
Adjustments, subject to Cabinet approval. Capital spending was
forecast to be 99.0% of the updated budget, a variance of
(£1.2m). Figure 5 in the report showed the summary Capital
Budgets by portfolio and Appendix 2 was a breakdown of the
programme in detail. Spend to date was £66.9m (56.3% of
budget). There were five key projects with £14.7m of budget
as yet unspent, where the majority of the budget was expected to be
spent in the final quarter. These were outlined in Section 4.2 of
the Cabinet report.
 
RESOLVED
–
 

(1)              
That Cabinet note the report and risks
and opportunities within it.

(2)              
That
Cabinet note the actions being taken to mitigate pressures as set
out in paragraph 1.3 of the
Cabinet report.