Issue - meetings

The Interim Director of Finance and Resources presented the Finance and Performance Monitoring Report – Quarter 1 2023/24.

Members were advised that the report detailed the following Council positions in the first quarter of the 2023/24 financial year:

·             the Council’s forecast outturn revenue position for the year,

·             an update on the Council’s capital programme for the year,

·             the procurement pipeline, and

·             the organisation’s performance measures against its strategic priorities.

From a revenue perspective, the Council had a £10.7 million budget for 2023/24 which was approved by Council in February 2023. Overall, the Council was currently forecasting a revenue overspend against the first quarter budget totalling £139,000. This was due to the anticipated 2023/24 pay award, which was yet to be ratified. If this was extrapolated upwards for the full year, it was anticipated that the Council would overspend in the region of £557,000.

It was estimated that utilities increases were running at 70 per cent but in the 2023/24 budget a 100 per cent increase in budget was assumed and a reserve was set up for the same amount. Given the forecast overspend linked to the anticipated 2023/24 pay award and that the Council had not experienced the increases in utility costs anticipated, it was proposed that £557,000 of the utilities reserve for 2023/4 should be released to offset the overspend position.  This pay issue would need to be addressed in the 2024/5 budget which would leave the utilities reserve for 2024/5 and 2025/6 untouched.

There was a small underspend of £4,114 against the £100,000 grants to voluntary bodies budget. The report requested approval to allocate the underspend to the Citizens Advice Bureau (CAB) Redditch branch to gain a physical presence back in Redditch and enable residents to access face to face appointments.

From a capital perspective, the Council had a capital programme of £12.6 million which was approved in the budget in February 2023. Of this, £10.6 million was externally funded whilst £2.0 million was Council funded. As noted from the Financial Outturn 2022/23 report, there was £3.292 million budget slippage from 2022/23 which would be added to this budget. At Quarter 1, the actual spend against the original 2023/24 capital budget was £583,000.

There were a number of capital programme changes detailed in the report including:

·             reprofiling of Ipsley Church Lane cemetery budget from 2023/24 to 2024/25,

·             increased fleet replacement costs totalling £611,000,

·             the leisure changing places budget totalling £21,750 to provide a state of the art toilet facility for visitors to Redditch town centre.

As approved by Executive in July 2023, a list of procurements estimated at a value of over £200,000, and which were delegated for approval to the Executive Committee or to Officers over the following year, were detailed in Appendix D. Whilst Appendix E detailed all procurement estimated at a value of between £50,000-£200,000. Appendix F of the report detailed procurement that impacted on Redditch but which was procured by Bromsgrove district Council due to the shared nature of some of the Councils’ services.  ...  view the full minutes text for item 37