Powys County Council spends nearly £80m in 12 months

The budget for 2018/2019 was £81.170 million, although the original budget was £87.703 million, leaving £4.799m or 5.87 per cent of the budget uncommitted at the end of March 2019.

Extra grant funding of £5.971m was provided by the Welsh Government during the latter months of the financial year, and where appropriate this has been used to fund existing capital spending, and replaces the need to borrow for some schemes.

One of the biggest grants received by the council has been £2,100,000 for the purchase of public buses. The funding will be claimed and paid to third party providers for the purchase of 12 buses for use on the Traws Cymru T4 network.

Specialist

The council also received £1,579,411 in a Public Highways Refurbishment Grant and £155,000 for costs relating to Storm Callum in October 2018. £35,000 has been spent in 2018/19 and works to the value of £120,000 will be carried out in 2019/20, which is permitted under the grant conditions.

Specialist equipment to be used in the community to support adult social care has been purchased from a £100,000 Integrated Care Fund (ICF) grant, and a £1.7 million Schools Building Maintenance grant was received in March to fund expenditure on schools in the major improvement programme.

Some capital projects are running late including the construction of a recycling centre at Newtown, flood alleviation schemes in Talgarth and Welshpool and strengthening works on the B4398 New Bridge Vyrnwy, which will continue this financial year.

The full budget of the 21st Century Schools project was not used in 2018/2019 and it will be rolled forward to 2019/2020.

The cabinet noted and approved the contents of the report at a meeting on Tuesday.

Chink of light in council’s financial gloom

The dark financial clouds surrounding Powys County Council lifted slightly in the last month of the 2018/19 financial year.

During March the situation improved slightly with Powys County Council (PCC), ending up recording an overspend of £713,000 from a total budget of £247 million. It had been predicted at the end of February that the overspend would be nearly £2.5 million.

But while delighted with this, finance portfolio holder Councillor Aled Davies (Conservative – Llanrhaedr-ym-Mochnant/Llansilin), pointed out that it was still an overspend.

To come up with the end-of-year total, £7 million had to be poured into the budget from the general reserves fund, leaving it at just over £9 million.

But, significantly, the council only delivered savings or cuts of £6.5 million, which is only 58 per cent of the target of £12.296 million.

Finance portfolio holder Councillor Davies read out the end-of-year financial report at the cabinet meeting on Tuesday.

Balance

He said: “The last period of the year saw a significant improvement.

“The savings delivered during the year are £6.5 million, 58 per cent of the target.

“The 2018/19 budget saw the use of £7 million of reserves to balance the budget to support the investment needed in children’s and adults’ services.”

“The difference between the end of February and March saw a shift of £1.7 million around social services, schools and leisure services.”

This was due to the over-forecasting of spending as well as grant funding arriving.

Councillor Davies added that the two main areas of concern have been children’s services, where there has been an overspend of £5.6 million, and highways, transport and recycling (HTR) where the overspend was more than £900,000.

Undelivered savings of nearly £2.3 million in children’s services were written off.