What a week! Final touches on the budget we have just managed to balance for 2022-23, with a little bit of extra funding in the settlement. There are still gaps in the future medium-term financial plan years that we will mitigate through the further development of demand management strategies in those key growth areas of housing, adult social care, children’s care and waste.

Balancing this year’s plan has been hard, as we work organisationally to invest enough into adult social care to prevent a persistent overspend. It has required a significant savings delivery programme, which has seen £18m come from our workforce budgets, £25m from our third-party spend and contracts, £9m from our capital repayment budgets and a couple of million from re-engineering other smaller budgets. This is a huge amount from our budget in a single year and, with the size of the savings ask, comes a level of non-delivery risk which will undermine our plan.