The Council has today announced proposals to change staff terms and conditions. This will help save £2.9m. The proposals will be sent to the trades unions on Thursday 15 October to start our formal consultation.
Personnel Committee will consider these proposals on 10th November 2009.
The authority has also been developing its budget proposals for the next financial year. By law we have to produce a budget that balances. Budget plans will be presented to full council on 25 February 2010.
The authority has decided to launch its budget consultation a month earlier than usual, due to the serious budget challenges that we face. This means that Cabinet will consider the initial budget proposals on 18 November 2009.
A period of consultation with staff and the public will extend through until late January 2010. We feel that this will give a greater opportunity to consider and consult on the proposals in detail.
We along with most other local authorities are facing very serious budget challenges over the next 3-4 years and we will rise to meet these challenges.
We have a set budget of £480m next year, out of which we need to re-allocate £33m to meet the ever increasing demand for our services, especially in adult social care and children’s safeguarding. In these areas alone, we have to find an additional £15.5m and £5m respectively, just to cater for our aging population and to meet the rise in safeguarding referrals that have followed the Baby Peter case. The trends in Nottinghamshire match the trends nationally.
Departments have been asked to produce options for up to 10% savings in each of their areas. These possible options are still being developed along with other corporate initiatives to save money. Clearly, changing the way we deliver our services will have an impact on numbers of posts, but we have been taking steps, such as the current vacancy protocol, to keep the number of redundancies to an absolute minimum. Speculation that redundancies will run into the thousands is simply wrong.
Once options have been fully developed they will form the basis of the initial budget plan to be presented to Cabinet on 18 November 2009.
In addition to these pressures, we are predicting that our revenue grant from government will reduce from 2011-12 onwards and that specific grants are likely to come under intense scrutiny. As a result we anticipate that we will need to save a further £32m in 2011-12 and £20m in 2012-13. We will be developing plans to meet these challenges in the early part of 2010.
