Telford council in 'surprisingly stable' financial position amid pandemic

But it is still “extremely difficult” to plan for the future, cabinet members have said.

A report by chief financial officer Ken Clarke told the cabinet the authority faced a £5.2 million funding gap, but government emergency response funding nearly closed this, leaving just £65,000.

Councillor David Wright, whose portfolio includes the economy, said such a position would not have been expected when coronavirus began to take hold, and credited both “our creative work as a council” and government grant support.

Councillor Andy Burford, who is responsible for health and social care in the Labour-run administration, agreed Telford and Wrekin has “managed better than most”, but said outside factors like the delayed Social Care Green Paper made it “extremely difficult to plot a way forward”.

In his “2021-22 Financial Monitoring Report”, Mr Clarke said there are “residual Covid-19 pressures” including shortfalls in earnings from council-run facilities and business rates collections.

“It is still too early in the year to make accurate predictions of the ongoing impact of coronavirus and how quickly the economy will recover,” he wrote.

“The position will continue to be monitored and updates provided throughout the year.

“The projected service pressures are currently £4.24 million. Adding the £1 million anticipated funding shortfalls relating to business rates takes the total pressure to £5.24 million against which the £5.18 million emergency response finding will be applied leaving a residual current projection of an overspend of £65,000 by year end.

“This is prior to using the council’s budget contingency.”

Councillor Wright said: “This shows the solid, sound and high-quality financial management in place in this local authority. “We’ve heard a variety of stories over the last few years about councils not showing the level of financial resilience that we are and I think we can be very proud, locally, that we’ve got a very steady base.

“If you’d said to us at the start of Covid that we’d be in a stable position by this stage in terms of our overall budget you would have been quite surprised, really.

“That has been a mix of two things. Before the opposition members say, I’ll say it: it has been a mix of our creative work as a council and support from the Government through some of the grant programmes. Let’s not be churlish, this has been a collective effort to try and get us through this period.”

Councillor Burford said: “I don’t want to cast a negative light on this because it is a positive report for us, but on the other hand there are the huge uncertainties going forward which this paper points out, not least the adult social care green paper, the new homes bonus, the fact that we still don’t have certainty going forward in terms of spending review beyond a year. All those things make it extremely difficult to plan and plot a way forward.

“But we are managing that and we have managed that better than most.”

Conservative councillor Adrian Lawrence said: “I’ll echo a lot of those comments as well. I find myself agreeing with Councillor Wright over there that this is an instance where we have done a good job but without the government’s support it would have been extremely difficult because everything was locked down last year.

“It’s absolutely right the government came forward with that emergency response. That covered the gap in the short term and gave everybody the breathing space to figure out what was going on in the world and come up with a solution.”

The House of Commons Library’s website says the publication of the Social Care Green Paper “has been delayed several times”.

“It was originally due to be published in ‘summer 2017’,” it says.

“The latest position, stated in September 2019, is that it will be published ‘in due course’.”