Meeting documents

Members of the Overview and Scrutiny Committee received a report providing information which affected the Council’s revenue budget for 2019/20 and the setting of Council Tax for 2019/20.

The Director of Resources went through the report in detail as follows:-

·       The announcement of the decision to create a unitary authority in Buckinghamshire from 2020/21 did not affect the requirement on the Council to set a legal and prudent budget for 2019/20 that addressed the Council’s aims and objectives. However, it would be necessary at a corporate level to make provisions within reserves for the transition costs to the new unitary authority.

·       The 19/20 Government funding figures were better than expected at the time of setting the 2018/19 budget as the Government had decided to cancel the ‘negative RSG’ of £414k planned for 2019/20.

·       Since the December Cabinet there had been two amendments to the draft budget relating to the reduction in the Housing Benefit Administration grant of £20k and the additional car parking income of £30k. Car parking charges were still to be discussed at the Environment Policy Advisory Group in March.

·       The overall effect of these changes would mean a budget requirement of £7,642k which would result in a council tax increase of £5 (3.2%) which was the maximum permitted for the Council by Government. This would be up to £163 for a Band D property.

·       The revised fees and charges were noted.

·       The proposed 2019/20 budget did not require any use of the General Reserves to fund general expenditure which was an improvement on the position reported to Cabinet in December. However, consideration needed to be given to earmarking some of the reserves to fund the implementation costs of the new unitary authority. The original proposal for South Bucks District’s share was £1.552 m.

·       Earmarked reserves would be utitlised for the Local Development Document reserve, Economic Development reserve and the National Infrastructure reserve.

·       A number of projects were being progressed to implement further savings as a result of the reduction in Government funding such as the Planning Shared Service implementation and the Customer Experience Strategy.

·       Section E of the report set out the advice from the Director of Resources identifying the main financial risks to the Council such as a shortfall on income targets, cost of major planning inquiries and enforcement action, cost of temporary accommodation and letting income from Capswood offices.

During questions Members noted that a Council Tax increase of £5 was the maximum amount allowed by Government or a 2.99% increase, whichever was the higher. For SBDC £5 was the highest but for CDC the increase of 2.99% was better. This was consistent with the strategy used in previous years to maximise the Council Tax. Members agreed that a referendum to increase the council tax was not cost effective.

A Member asked about the budget for the Shadow Authority for the transitional costs. The Director of Resources commented that the total budget estimated at this stage of £22.2million would be managed by the Implementation Team and the Shadow Executive. Officers would be seconded and or appointed into this team to manage the transition process and if any officers from this Council were seconded then there could be some further costs to backfill their posts which would be borne by the transition budget. There would be a huge amount of work involved in the transitional process particularly on governance, finance and council tax and also other issues such as having one banking contract and enabling different IT solutions to communicate. One major cost would be redundancies.

In response to a question, the Director of Resources reported that there should be no financial issues with the new Unitary District Council in terms of its set up and early operation but that there could be financial challenges in the longer term. Work would need to be undertaken by the five Section 151 Officers to aggregate the Medium Term Financial Strategies of all five Councils.

A Member asked about the different systems being used by each Authority and the Director of Resources reported that this would probably be addressed in 2020 once the new Authority had been formed. The accounts of all five Councils have to be closed by the end of May 2020. An interim 151 Officer would be appointed for the Shadow Authority. A further question was asked about the position of the budget for this Council and Members noted that South Bucks District had a healthy and well established budget for transition into the new Unitary District Authority if there were no forthcoming financial challenges.

RESOLVED that following discussion on the 2019/20 revenue budget report that Cabinet be informed that the Committee had no comments.