Agenda and minutes

Apologies for absence were received from Councillors Allen, Goldspink, Lane,  Over and Todd.

No declarations of interest were made.

PLEASE REMEMBER TO BRING YOUR COPY OF THE BUDGET BOOK

We welcomed the Cabinet Members and Directors to the meeting.  The Chairman particularly welcomed Andrew Mackintosh, the new Director of Communications to the meeting.

The report came to the Joint Meeting as part of the Council’s agreed process for budget setting and informed the Meeting of the Cabinet’s revised proposals for the Medium Term Financial Plan to 2015/16 following the Cabinet’s meeting on 20 December 2010.  The Cabinet Member for Resources gave an update on what had happened since our meeting in November 2010.

The Cabinet had pursued the following approach in developing its budget:

•          Robustly pursuing its efficiency agenda.

•          Considering different methods of service delivery e.g. private and voluntary sector.

•          Reducing the number of people employed by the organisation and reducing senior management costs.

•          Property rationalisation.

•          Reductions in services only where the above approaches did not deliver the savings required.

The local government finance settlement had now been announced and its key points were:

•          Formula grant would be reduced by over 10% (£8.9m) for 2011-12 and by another 7.8% (£5.6m) in 2012-13

•          Grant clawback removed £4.8m from Peterborough next year, and another £2.5m the year after that

•          By 2012-13 over £1m would be top-sliced for academies

•          A new formula meant we received £700k less than predicted for concessionary travel, and £900k less for adult social care

•          The Medium Term Financial Plan (MTFP) impact:

–        2011-12 - £2.6m million less

–        2012-13 - £4.3m million less

–        Due to changes in how Government calculated funding allocation, plus higher front-loading of cuts

•          A range of grants for children’s services, including sure start and connexions, had been placed into a single pot (Early Intervention Grant) and cut by 13%.

•          A number of Area Based Grants totalling £1.7m, including education grants provided to the authority for use across the city, were ‘missing’

•          The total impact could be around £2.3m for 2011-12

•          The grant for Adult social care would be paid via health:

–        £2M in 2011-12 and 2012-13

The final summary position for the budget was therefore:

Questions and observations were made in the following areas:

• Was the proposed budget still sustainable in light of the Government’s final announcement and had enough cuts been made?  We believed that the budget was still sustainable but some of the figures from the Government had been  ...  view the full minutes text for item 3.