Agenda and minutes

To remind Members of the need to record the existence and nature of any personal, disclosable pecuniary or other registrable interests in items on the agenda, in accordance with the Members’ Code of Conduct.

Councillor Marigold Jaques declared an interest in Agenda Item three, but reported that, as her interest was a personal or an other registrable interest, but not a disclosable pecuniary interest, she determined to remain to take part in the debate and vote on the matter.

Purpose: To set out the findings of an internal review into the forecast overspend in the Adult Social Care (ASC) Revenue Budget in 2018/19.

(Councillor Marigold Jaques declared a personal interest in Agenda item three by virtue of the fact that she had been closely involved in the area of Adult Social Care and had some knowledge of the workings of the service. As her interest was personal and not prejudicial she was permitted to take part in the debate and vote on the matter).

Councillor Alan Law introduced the item and reported that the review into the in-year revenue overspend in Adult Social Care (ASC) had been requested for three reasons:

1.    The challenge of providing and funding proper and adequate ASC was one of the biggest challenges the country was facing as population age and life expectancy was increasing.

2.     Over the years financial planning and performance for ASC regularly reported a deficit by the end of quarter one, requiring the rest of the Council’s services to take mitigating action adding further management and financial pressures.

3.    There was an opportunity for the OSMC to be proactive and to add value to the review before recommendations were submitted to the Executive and Council for approval.

Councillor Law added that it was important that the OSMC had the opportunity to contribute to the process rather than viewing any findings in retrospect.

Nick Carter presented the report which set out the findings of an internal review into the forecast overspend in the Adult Social Care (ASC) Revenue Budget in 2018/19. He explained that the report had been prepared jointly with Julie Gillhespey whose detailed findings could be viewed under Appendix D to the report. Julie Gillhespey had focused largely on Long Term Services (LTS) and could provide more detail on this area if Members’ desired.

As at month six, an overspend of £2.9m had emerged in year within the ASC budget and various mitigating measures had been put in place which were expected to bring this down to around £2.1m at outturn. Given the significance of the overspend the Chief Executive had been asked to undertake a review to determine the cause of the overspend and how a similar situation could be avoided in the future.

Nick Carter then described the conclusions (contained in paragraph 6.1) which were based on the Q2 position:

(1)       Whilst the word ‘overspend’ had been used to define the current problem, in reality, insufficient budget was given to ASC from the outset so ‘budget deficit’ was perhaps a more accurate description. It was estimated that ASC was probably around £2m ‘short’ when it started the Financial Year on the 1 April 2018. Whilst much of the deficit could not have been avoided much of it could have been forecast and planned for in the preparation of the 2018/19 ASC Budget.

            There were therefore deficiencies in the modelling which was based on out of date data. This led to inaccurate assumptions as a result of human error rather than poor processes. The processes were in the main, satisfactory, although they had since been refined.

(2)       ASC had ‘overspent’ for the  ...  view the full minutes text for item 40.