Within your department, your senior leadership team will be aiming to keep you informed of measures or proposals that may impact your specific area of work.
Cost control measures
Like many other councils, we're currently facing significant financial pressures, many of which are outside our control and include inflationary pressures, meeting the cost of the national pay award and increasing demand on the services we provide.
In September 2023 we announced an in-year budget gap of £46.4 million and introduced a number of cost control measures to help reduce spending. These controls included a freeze on recruitment and a stop to non-essential spending.
From May 2024, we will move away from restricting ‘non-essential spend’ centrally, instead, leaders are responsible for ensuring that departments only spend money which can be managed within existing budgets.
Orders placed through the SAP system will continue to require Assistant Director approval, however, this approach will be reviewed by Executive Directors where it is causing operational difficulties.
Recruitment requests will also return to being managed within departments rather than being considered centrally.
Tackling the cause of our overspend
In addition to our savings proposals, we're addressing the causes for the overspend directly, however some of those causes are outside our control, such as inflation pressures and the increasing demand on the services we provide.
The meaning of the term ‘service review’
A service review means we will be looking at specific service areas and seeing if those areas can be run and managed differently to make them more efficient. This could include reviewing what we do, how we do it, where we do it or who does it.
Your contribution to saving money
We encourage everyone to share cost savings ideas so please speak to your manager if you have a suggestion. We're currently considering how a central approach to colleague suggestions could work including whether we have sufficient resources to manage such an approach on a day-to-day basis.
Within each department there may be a process for submitting your budget savings ideas so please check your departmental SharePoint site if you have one.
Engagement and consultation
Each budget saving proposal will follow its own timeline, and appropriate engagement or consultation with impacted colleagues and the public will take place before any decisions are made.
The proposed service reviews are all very different and will require different forms of engagement and consultation. We aim to provide you with the necessary information at the earliest opportunity, reduce the impact on colleagues as far as possible, and seek your views.
We'll also continue to work collaboratively and collectively with all recognised trade unions who have been briefed about the overall budget position and high level savings proposals. Regular discussions with recognised trade unions will continue to be held and we recognise their important role in voicing matters on behalf of the workforce.
The impact of removing vacant posts
In some service areas we're considering removing vacant posts in order to make savings. When making these decisions we have to accept that we can't continue to do everything that we've done in the past but with fewer people.
Across all departments we'll be prioritising the work we do and we'll have to consider the capacity that we have to deliver essential services.
We encourage you to hold open conversations within your teams and where workload pressures are too much, discuss ways to relieve that pressure including identifying things that are non-longer a priority and could be stopped.
The wellbeing of all our colleagues remains a priority so please speak to your line manager if you need support in managing your workload.
Redundancy concerns
At Derbyshire we have a strong track record of doing everything we can to avoid compulsory redundancies through retraining, redeployment and leaving empty posts unfilled.
It is our priority to continue doing this. Unfortunately, due to the scale of the budget savings that we need to make, we can't rule out the need to make redundancies in the future.