Issue - meetings

The Cabinet Member for Community Leadership and Engagement introduced the Council’s revenue budget monitoring report for the 2023/24 financial year as of 31 December 2023 (period 9).

The Council’s General Fund revenue budget for 2023/24 was previously set at £199.002m, although the Cabinet Member advised that since period 8 the budget had been updated to £194.46m to reflect the movement of the Capitalised Interest budget of £4.542m to the Central Expenses budget in order to improve transparency of the performance of the Investment and Acquisition Strategy (IAS) budget. 

The forecast outturn position at the end of December projected a net overspend of £9.336m after transfers to and from reserves, which represented an improvement of £1.203m on the position at period 8, and the Cabinet Member commented on the main reasons behind the movement.  The Housing Revenue Account (HRA) continued to show a projected overspend of circa £5.0m for 2023/24. 

Cabinet resolved to:

(i)  Note the projected £9.336m revenue overspend forecast at Period 9 for the General Fund for the 2023/24 financial year, as set out in sections 2 and 3 and Appendix A of the report and note the net projected year end drawdown of £4.73m reserves to support the in-year position;

(ii)  Note the projected £5.005m revenue overspend forecast for the Housing Revenue Account, as set out in section 6 and Appendix A of the report;

(iii)  Note the projected returns for the Investment and Acquisition Strategy as set out in section 4 and Appendix A of the report;

(iv)  Note the movement in Reserve drawdown as indicated in section 5 of the report and that the Cabinet shall be asked to approve the drawdown of reserves to support any overspends at final outturn (post March 2024), subject to finalisation of the actual spend against budget; and

(v)  Note the transfer of the Capitalised Interest budget of £4.542m from General Fund revenue funding to the Central Expenses budget.