Issue - meetings

To receive the report of the Strategic Director for Corporate Resources.

The Strategic Director for Corporate Resources presented the report making the following points:

·         all documents provided had been considered by Full Council and this was an opportunity to ask questions to better understand the financial position;

·         he was currently conducting a review of how financial information was presented to Members and endeavouring to make it more user-friendly especially at the end of the year; and

·         any underspend at the end of the year can be caused by late funding from government and there was a will to make the true position for each service more understandable.

The Strategic Director for Corporate Resources responded to Members questions in the following terms:

·         he would ask the museum service for performance data to give a fuller answer but the previous café owner had given notice and a trial was being undertaken with the team who run the café at St Sidwell’s Point and there was a small budget for this;

·         the St Sidwell’s Point café staff were council employees;

·         £1.1 million of the required £1.4 million had been delivered and this was the purpose of carrying reserves, to support and protect the Council should all savings not be made;

·         budget savings can prove to be challenging and setting income targets was a projection and may run short as it involved a range of assumptions and central government sometimes made changes;

·         a best estimate was £5.7 million savings required over the next three years;

·         Government was committed to business rate reset and this was the single reason for the required reductions;

·         there were some issues of staff shortage making some projects difficult to deliver and Members could ask any Head of Service why projects which had been signed off were not being delivered;

·         it may have helped if the business rate retention scheme had been reset in 2018;

·         some council’s had found this useful in balancing changes in government grants;

·         the council did not respond to the consultation but have commissioned some indicative work;

·         there were pockets of deprivation but compared to other areas in the country Exeter did not score highly for deprivation;

·         with Local Government reorganisation the Guildhall would no longer be suitable for office relocation and options were being considered and would be taken back to full Council at the appropriate time;

·         the idea had been to fund works from the Guildhall shopping centre surplus in order to free the Civic Centre for housing;

·         there was an assessment of the number of people who don’t live in the city but travel in which used a formula to calculate how much funding was received;

·         an amount was being paid to fund the backdated pension deficit;

·         pension valuation was being undertaken and there was an improved position;

·         the valuation was designed to meet an accounting standard which was calculated differently to a triennial valuation;

·         it was very difficult to project pension contributions but there was a three-year agreed amount and above this the tendency was to increase slightly each year;

·         information would be  ...  view the full minutes text for item 70