Cheshire East could not balance its books in adult services this year even if it closed all its libraries and leisure centres and didn’t spend a penny fixing roads, a councillor said.
Dane Valley councillor Andrew Kolker was sitting on the Adults and Health Committee discussing the massive financial pressures of social care on the council, and asked where the shortfall was coming from.
The service is predicting a £20.7 million overspend at the end of this financial year the bulk of the council’s predicted overspend of £27 million .
Coun Kolker (pictured) said: “£20m is just a monumental amount of money.
“I’d like to know where this money is going to come from. To put it in context, if we closed all our libraries, all our leisure centres and we didn’t spend a penny on the roads out of the revenue budget, you still wouldn’t come to the budget required, so what went wrong?”
As we have reported previously, 65% of the council tax Cheshire East collects is spent on about 10,000 very vulnerable people.
In a story last year, we reported that Coun Kath Flavell had said because council tax payers, instead of central government, had to foot the bill for adult social care and children’s social care, taxpayers faced “double taxation” which, combined with soaring inflation and a greater demand for adult social care, resulted in forced cuts to other services.
Coun Flavell said: “But when you add up, there are fewer than 3,000 children who (receive) social care and there are around 7,000 adults, which represents 10,000 people out of 400,000 – we are talking about that tiny percentage of people getting that money,” said Coun Flavell.
“We’re talking about the large majority of them are not getting all of their council tax spent on services that they are receiving and that has got to be sorted out.”
She added: “It’s a double taxation. People pay their taxes and their national insurance thinking that that’s where their social care comes from, but then they pay again for that social care for people in their county and it’s absolutely wrong, fundamentally wrong.”
At the recent meeting, Helen Charlesworth-May, executive director of adults, health and integration, told Coun Kolker: “£20m is a very, very shocking figure and nobody in the department or the council is complacent about this.”
But she told him: “I think it is also incumbent upon me to say that it is very, very unlikely that the department will be able to balance its budget this year – a reduction of £20m between now and the end of the financial year is very unlikely.”
But she did say it was possible it might be able to cut the overspend to £16m by the year end.
In response to the question about how the council was going to pay for this, finance officer Nikki Wood-Hill said Cheshire East would have to use the exceptional financial support from the Government.
Coun Ken Edwards (Bollington) said there needed to be a detailed breakdown of costs and the predicted overspend from adult services.
“We have had some general, vague comments, we’ve had no figures,” said Coun Edwards.
“£20 million is an enormous sum, pushing us into a situation where adult services are taking more than 40% of the whole budget of the council. Can that be sustained?”
Conservative group leader Janet Clowes (Wybunbury) agreed.
“We need that level of detail to drill down into the mechanics of how this has happened,” she said.
Coun Liz Wardlaw (Odd Rode) was critical of the position the council found itself in.
“We didn’t plan for it. We didn’t see it coming, we should have,” she said.
“We’ve been looking at this potential dilemma for at least 18 months, the savings that have been predicted have not been achieved.
“I don’t see anything new in the savings that are anticipated going forward.
“Increased charges, be more effective in staffing, agency staff reductions. I never see anything dynamic or new happening.”
With regard to any proposed increase in fees and charges, Coun Wardlaw said: “How many clients can afford these increases?”
The committee agreed it would provide a detailed financial breakdown of the predicted overspend to the Corporate Policy Committee, as had been requested by the Finance Sub-Committee earlier this month.
