Issue - meetings

The Cabinet Member for Finance, Growth and Investment introduced a report on the Council’s provisional revenue and capital outturn position for 2016/17.

The Cabinet Member advised that revenue expenditure for the financial year was projected at £162.095m, which included £6.839m of expenditure funded from specific reserves.  The final outturn of £155.255m represented an overspend variance of £4.940m, which was broadly in line with the projections that had been presented in the most recent monthly Budget Monitoring reports to Cabinet.  The Cabinet Member commented that the significant overspend position that had been predicted early in the financial year had been well managed, which had enabled the General Fund reserve to remain well above the minimum target balance of £15m, at approximately £17.9m.

The provisional outturn for the Capital Programme showed expenditure of £173.070m against the revised budget of £184.662, although the Cabinet Member stressed that the difference was due to slippage rather than projects not being progressed.  The Cabinet was also advised of carry forward requests, proposed transfers to and from reserves, a proposal to capitalise pension strain costs stemming from the in-year redundancy programme and costs associated with the Council’s transformation programme.

In response to a question, the Cabinet Member undertook to provide his colleagues with details of the two window replacement projects listed in Appendix B to the report.

The Cabinet resolved to:

(i)  Note the provisional outturn position for 2016/17 of the Council’s General Fund revenue budget at 31 March 2017, as detailed in sections 2 to 4 of the report;

(ii)  Approve the requests for carry forwards and transfers to and from reserves as set out in section 5 and Appendix A of the report;

(iii)  Note the provisional outturn for the Housing Revenue Account at 31 March 2017 as detailed in section 6 of the report;

(iv)  Note the projected outturn position for 2016/17 of the Council’s capital budget as at 31 March 2017, as detailed in section 7 and Appendix B of the report;

(v)  Approve the proposal to capitalise the pension strain costs arising from redundancies as detailed in section 8 of the report; and

(vi)  Note that £5.101m was allocated under the Flexible Use of Capital Receipts approach, approved by the Assembly as part of the MTFS on 22 February 2017, to support the Council's transformation programme.