HOW big a funding gap Powys County Council is expected to fill with cuts and savings over the next four to five years varies by over £20 million – a councillor has pointed out.
Calls were made to clarify the figures that the council is using to explain their predicted financial black hole during a joint meeting of all of the council’s scrutiny committee’s on Wednesday, June 11.
At the meeting, councillors looked at the council’s draft Corporate and Equalities Strategic Plan which has been updated from the version that was agreed earlier this year.
The plan sets out the council’s well-being objectives, and what action they need to take to deliver them up the next local election in 2027.
All the departmental strategies, action and business plans are linked by a “golden thread” into this document which encompasses them all.
This plan is supposed to keep track of how the council is performing against the three objectives of the Liberal Democrat/Labour cabinet’s Stronger Fairer, Greener agenda.
Cllr Gareth E Jones (Powys Independents) highlighted the problem and said: “If you go to the leader and deputy leader’s introduction (to the document) there’s a statement there that the funding gap is £60 million but on the MTFS (Medium Term Financial Strategy) the funding gap on those assumptions is shown as £39.1 million.
“I think they two figures need to be the same for consistency.”
Director of corporate services and section 151 officer, Jane Thomas replied: “We can and will amend that to the latest figure, it should reflect what was approved in council back in February.
“We will see the gap change quite often now as we go through the years and we develop our five year plans.”
Making sure that the figure changes forms one of the recommendations made by councillors at the meeting – which will be added to the report when it goes before cabinet at a later date.
Another recommendation by councillors is that members of the Liberal Democrat/Labour cabinet should attend the joint scrutiny meeting to explain and if needed defend the council’s performance.
Cllr Jones said: “It was very disappointing about the number of cabinet members that were present today, we should have a recommendation at future meetings that they have more presence.
“This is the council’s performance document ,officers develop the plan but cabinet member sign it off.”
Learning and skills committee chairman who chaired the joint-scrutiny meeting, Cllr Gwynfor Thomas (Conservative) said: “I’m happy to do that as they (cabinet members) are the line holders and are responsible for the different measures and things.”
The plan is expected to go before a Cabinet meeting later this month.
