Agenda item

Purpose of the report:  Scrutiny of Services/Budgets

This report presents the revenue and capital budget monitoring up-date for October 2013 with projected year-end outturn.

Declarations of interest: None.

Witnesses: Kevin Kilburn, Deputy Chief Finance Officer

Key points raised during the discussion:

1.    The Committee was informed that at its meeting on Monday 2 December 2013, the Performance & Finance Sub-Group considered the October 2013 budget monitoring report and reviewed the quarter two Business Report.

2.    The Performance & Finance Sub-Group had requested the following additional information in relation to the budget monitoring report:

·         Reconciliation in tabular form of changes to the overall financial position of each Directorate on a month-by-month basis, including progress against target savings.  It was suggested that this information could also be included as an annexe to each future monitoring report.

·         The reasons behind the expected increase in training activity in the latter part of the financial year, and the process for agreeing the consequent £400,000 over-spend.

It was agreed that the Sub-Group would discuss the operation of the Council’s Reserves at its next meeting.

3.    The Chairman informed the Committee that he had requested that officers present information on unit costs at the Sub-Group meeting. The Committee noted that although expenditure per head in Surrey was slightly higher than its statistical neighbours it was not significantly so.The sub group believed the benchmarking information would be useful in considering the budget and Medium Term Financial Plan.

4.    In relation to the training budget overspend, officers commented that the increase in expenditure in relation to training was as result of a Cabinet decision to continue a scheme to fund the training of social workers. This reduced the reliance on locum and temporary staff and ensured greater savings in the Adult Social Care budget. The Committee challenged why this expenditure was showing in the HR budget, given that the savings were being made elsewhere. Officers recognised that coding the expenditure to the Adult Social Care budget would be considered as part of the budget setting process for 2014-15.

5.    The Committee asked if the waste PFI grant was considered an area of risk, and it was confirmed that delays in implementing the Eco Park could lead to the grant being suspended, cancelled or claimed back. The DEFRA had now informed the council that the grant would be reduced from January 2014 until the eco-park was operational.

6.    The Committee was informed that as part of its consideration of the Quarterly Business Report, the Sub-Group had received a demonstration of the Performance Dashboard. The Dashboard allowed officers with responsibility for performance to look at the detailed information which feeds into the summary report presented to the Committee.  Performance against individual indicators was tracked on a monthly basis, and details were provided about the action taken to address areas where performance was below target.

7.    It was noted that officers completed a forecast about whether the year-end targets would be achieved as part of their quarterly updates, and that this information could be tracked over the course of a year and against the final out-turn result to understand how accurate the forecasts had been.

8.    In order to ensure that the information available through the Dashboard was used effectively, the Sub-Group would continue to review the detailed information at future meetings and report any areas of concern for discussion by the Committee.  Where additional issues were identified by the Committee, these would be referred to the Sub-Group for more detailed investigation at the next meeting and reported back (as appropriate) or referred to the relevant Select Committee.

9.    The Committee was informed that the more detailed narrative for the Quarterly Business report was published online, and that the link to this information would be circulated to the Committee outside of the meeting.

Recommendations:

None.

Actions/further information to be provided:

The Committee to receive the link to the Quarterly Business report and the detailed narrative in order to identify areas for future scrutiny by the Performance & Finance Sub-Group.

Committee Next Steps:

None.