This has increased significantly since quarter 1, mainly due to additional forecast expenditure on placements in children's social care, and expenditure on special educational needs and home to school transport.
Throughout the year we have been closely monitoring our financial situation, working to implement the savings proposals that were set out in our 2024/2025 budget and exploring ways to reduce costs by changing the way we operate.
As a result of this forecast and as an immediate measure, our team of executive directors will now be implementing new strict controls over vacancy management, procurement and expenditure on goods and services.
This includes:
- only filling business critical staff vacancies
- significantly reducing agency spend
- limiting overtime to business-critical circumstances
- ensuring any new procurement is business critical
- reducing, stopping or pausing activity under existing procurement contracts as far as possible
- assessing high-cost areas of external spend and immediately target activity to reduce expenditure
- minimising spend on travel for essential business requirements only
- catering and hospitality only in exceptional circumstances with no catering to be provided for internal staff meetings, with no exceptions
When making decisions about reducing costs, it's important to remember that we are one council with one budget and that we should avoid actions that simply move costs from one service to another.
To further accelerate our savings and demand reduction activity we are also planning to secure some additional external capacity. We have delivered significant savings already - £45 million this year and £19 million identified for next year. But, because of the extremely challenging financial situation local government is now in, we need additional capacity and capability to identify and deliver further savings and efficiencies and to increase the pace of achieving savings and cost reductions.
If you have any questions about spend in your area, please speak to your line manager and always consider where you can make savings.
We will continue to monitor our spend very closely and keep you informed of any changes to our approach.