Budget

Well after all the hard work our budget proposals have now been published and will go to cabinet on Tuesday before going on for wider scrutiny. With inevitable service pressures in a number of areas to include adult social care the budget gap this year is £7.319M. This also reflects a 9.8% reduction in our main government grant to £69.592M. Regrettably it will lead to further job losses - up to 49.5 FTE job losses. Of these jobs 23.5 are currently occupied with the remainder being held vacant in anticipation of these proposals. So pretty bad but not perhaps as bad as we initially feared and we currently have 33 other posts held vacant where we will need to recruit. Whilst it is not inevitable that these vacancies will be suitable for staff whose posts are at risk we have been very effective over the last few years in retaining staff and avoiding compulsory redundancies. In the meantime I am delighted that with the assistance of the government we are offering a council tax freeze (for the 3rd time in 4 years) and a freeze in car parking charges (for the 6th time in 7 years) and leisure charges. The proposals also include some exciting new capital projects and because of our careful financial control in recent years we have accumulated some earmarked reserves which can now fund some short term investment to strengthen our teams in school improvement and economic development.