Suffolk County Council savings to help plug £22m gap

Suffolk County Council is forecast to spend £22.3m above its £688.1m annual budget

Suffolk County Council has said it will use its savings to help plug a £22m spending gap.

It said transport for pupils with special educational needs and disabilities and looking after children in care made up two-thirds of the gap.

The Tory-run authority said it would use savings in the short term, but this was "not sustainable" and every department would have to make cuts.

Opposition groups blamed a lack of funding from central government.

The council forecast it would spend £22.3m over its £688.1m budget for the year.

The county had also received an extra £8m from the government, meaning it was effectively £30m over budget.

A meeting of the council's cabinet, which discussed the first quarter of the 2023-24 revenue budget paper on Tuesday, also heard that adult care services were forecast to overspend by £3.5m and inflation and interest rates had been "higher than experienced in a generation".

'Skinflinting'

The opposition Green, Liberal Democrat and independent group said the Conservatives could have put up council tax by 5%, but had only approved a 4% increase.

The group's finance spokesman, Green councillor Robert Lindsay, said: "They've been skinflinting the council tax for years now.

"It's also the government's fault for being stingy with the amount they give to run these essential services."

Richard Rout, Conservative deputy leader of the council, said while it had been able to publish a balanced budget in February it was "already having to spend more than we anticipated".

"Even although the country is now starting to see price rises slowing and energy costs beginning to drop we are still suffering the cost impacts of various global shocks - in particular Covid-19 and the war in Ukraine," he said.

He added that the authority was "experiencing unexpectedly high demands on certain services, meaning some are spending disproportionately more than others".

Mr Rout said it was a similar story for many councils across the country which have had to reduce services and put spending freezes in place and now "unfortunately, we must now have these discussions too".

"For many years, we have made savings through our transformation programmes - essentially ways of working smarter and leaner whilst still delivering services," he said.

"We have also built up an appropriate level of reserves, meaning we have savings which we are able to call upon now.

"But this is not sustainable and now that cabinet has been presented with the council's first financial report for this year, we will work with directors to help reduce this predicted overspend."