Your say / Politics
‘Every corner of the council is being looked at to see how we can close the financial gap’
When I stepped into role of leader of Bristol City Council, I made a promise to my fellow councillors and to residents of this city that our administration would be one built on openness and transparency.
It’s in that spirit that I pen today’s blog about our budget and the route we’re taking to balance our finances in the coming years.
Let’s start from the beginning – what does our current budget forecast say? Our best estimates at the moment indicate that the gap between how much we believe we will need to spend next year on things like delivering day to day services, is just under £52m more than we expect to receive in income.
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If we look further ahead to the coming five years, the gap between our forecasted spending and how much we estimate we can collect in income steadily grows until we hit a five-year peak deficit of £68.4m in 2028/29.
Our task between now and the end of the financial year in March is to find a way of closing that gap and deliver a legal, balanced budget.
To achieve this, officers have been working for months on analysing the council’s finances, putting spending controls in place to limit spending to only the necessary outgoings, and pulling together the information required so I and other elected colleagues can begin to consider some informed choices on how we plan to spend our money in future.
Every corner of the council is being looked at to see how one or more of three main areas of action can be taken to close the financial gap.
These three areas are:
- Increasing income – this would include potentially increasing how much we charge for some services or possibly introducing new charges for services that had previously been free.
- Reducing or stopping services – in some cases we may propose that reducing costs in an area of the council can only be achieved by reducing how much that service delivers or potentially ending the delivery of some things we currently do.
- Changing the way we operate – this is mostly about looking inward and finding ways in which the council can be more efficient, reduce duplication or manage services in a different way to make them cheaper to run.
Any decisions on balancing our finances will only be made after the proposals for achieving this have been through multiple layers of scrutiny and review.
Many will also be subject to public consultation, which will ensure resident opinion plays a big role in shaping how these proposals are taken forward.
At the moment, ideas of how services can take one or more of the three actions listed above are being considered by a committee of councillors dedicated to developing the council’s budget.
This group is reviewing the proposals and asking officers to prepare the detail needed to publish a full list of proposals, from all parts of the council, in early January.
The group will meet in public in January and will also include in their meeting the early results of the public consultation, which remains open to receive your views and runs until midnight on Thursday.
When the strategy & resources policy committee meets at the beginning of February, the detail needed to formulate a balanced budget will have been scrutinised and ready to ensure informed decisions can be made about the budget we propose for all councillors to vote on at the end of February.
Any cuts will have to be ultimately approved at a full council meeting – photo: Rob Browne
Every part of the council is having to go through this process and proposals for closing the financial gap are being considered from all quarters.
Councillors will be asked to consider ideas related to areas like libraries, social services, waste services, some culture services, and internal services such as IT, finance, HR and many other services.
It may seem like a lengthy process, but I can assure you it’s important that we consider, review and scrutinise every inch of detail emerging from our financial investigations to ensure our budget plans are financially watertight and also fully appreciate the impact they will have on the residents of our city.
I also appreciate that for some, wanting to know every idea being considered is as important as knowing the detail of those we intend to take forward.
On this we have to draw a line and to consider what’s most valuable.
Sharing all of the ideas we have without any context or detail, whether we intend to take them forward or not only leads to confusion and unnecessary worry.
The approach we’re taking is to share those ideas we intend to explore further and publish these with the detail needed for residents to develop an informed opinion.
We’re committed to sharing our proposals for balancing the budget in January.
In the meantime, officers will continue to analyse and monitor our financial position and consider any impacts these decisions will have on different groups and individuals across our city.
This includes taking into account the detail from government we expect to get on our allocation of national funds, later in December.
Councillors will continue to scrutinise and test the ideas coming forward for closing the financial gap, ensuring that a consistent, and ethical approach is taken to recommending those to be taken forward.
This opinion piece by Tony Dyer, leader of Bristol City Council, was originally published on the council’s website
Main photo: Rob Browne
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