The Council’s Corporate Scrutiny Committee met today (26 March) to review progress on the Council’s multi-year Improvement Plan.
We’re happy to report that most of our eleven key programs are currently on-track. This positive news comes alongside our recent approval of the five-year Council Plan and confirmation of our current financial stability.
While we’ve made significant strides, the report highlights that we need to keep working on two specific areas: ensuring ongoing financial sustainability (Programme 4) and strengthening our financial management (Programme 5). We’ve already taken strong steps to address these through our finance improvement plan. For example, we now have healthy reserve funds, our financial performance is improving, and we anticipate our 2024/25 general fund spending to be very close to our budget.
Looking ahead, we’ve significantly reduced our budget gap for 2025/26 to approximately £20.79 million. This is a big improvement from the £41 million gap we faced in 2024/25, and we expect this gap to shrink even further.
With our finances now stable, we’re focusing on achieving full financial sustainability. This will involve successfully implementing our planned transformation program, with a key goal of having a completely balanced budget by 2027/28.