Issue - meetings

Report CSD17036

The Director of Finance circulated the following supplementary information and amended recommendations -

“There were no changes to the final Mayoral precept accepted by the London Assembly on 20th February 2017. 

Since the last meeting of the Executive there have been further changes on levies and the final position is shown in recommendation 2.1 (d) below.

On 20^th February details of the final Local Government Finance Settlement were published. There are no changes to the level of Settlement Funding compared to the provisional settlement.  Final allocations of New Homes Bonus were also confirmed and Bromley’s allocation is £85k higher than previously estimated due to returned top-slice funding.

On 21^st February 2017 the Department for Communities and Local Government issued the conditions relating to the Adult Social Care precept:

2% increase requires information to ensure that adult social care budgets are not being decreased by a greater proportion than those of other non-ringfenced services and that the precept is being used for adult social care costs;

3% increase requires additional evidence that the extra funding will be used to improve the way that adult social care services are delivered;

as announced in the provisional settlement the precept increase must be no greater than 6% in total over the next three years.

Updated information has been received from Bromley CCG regarding the 2017/18 Better Care Fund. This provides an indicative allocation of £20,287k compared to £20,427k previously reported. £38k of this reduction relates to funding retained by the CCG resulting in a reduction of £102k in the Bromley element and the draft Central Contingency has been reduced to reflect this.  Final allocations are awaited and any required changes will be reflected in the 2017/18 budget monitoring reports.

Members are requested to note that, since the last report to Executive the following items have been allocated from the Central Contingency to Portfolio budgets:

  Impact of Pension Fund Triennial Valuation - £700k

Education SEN and Adult Social Care - £1,200k

Apprenticeship Levy - £350k

National Living Wage - £737k

Other Minor Variations - £10k

It is important to note that the 2017/18 Central Contingency sum includes significant costs not yet allocated to Portfolio budgets at this stage. Therefore, there will be further changes to the Central Contingency to reflect allocations to individual Portfolio budgets prior to publication of the Financial Control Budget.

The above changes will require the following proposed amendments to be made to the recommendations of the Executive:

Amended Recommendation (2.1)

(b)  approves the draft revenue budgets for 2017/18 with the following amendments:

(iii)  On 8^th February 2017, Executive approved the drawdown of £1m from the Central Contingency Budget for 2017/18 to meet the impact of the National Living Wage and associated increase in ceiling rates.  Details are set out in a report entitled “Care Home and Extra Care Quality Monitoring Report 2016”.

(iv)  an increase of £85k in New Homes Bonus set aside to support the revenue budget;

(v)  a reduction of £102k Better Care Fund  ...  view the full minutes text for item 75