Agenda item

(To receive a report by Steve Houchin, Head of Finance – Adult Care and Community Wellbeing, which sets out the expected underspend for the financial year 2018/19)

Consideration was given to a report which set out the expected budget outturn projection for 2018/19.  It was noted that the Adult Care and Community Wellbeing net budget was £221.006m, and based on current information available to 31 December 2018, it was estimated that AC & CW would produce an underspend of £0.642m for the financial year 2018/19.

Members were guided through the report and provided with the opportunity to ask questions to the officers present in relation to the information contained within the report and some of the points raised during discussion included the following:

·         Income lost from bad debts was £0.9m and it was queried whether there was a strategy to review the service from Serco and the credit control function.  It was noted that this amount was significant but it had already been included in the budget.  It was noted that the current process would be looked at.

·         The delays in completing financial assessments sometimes resulted in large amounts of back dated payments being made.

·         There was a need to recognise some of the good work and achievements.

·         It was queried what property debtor income was and members were advised that this referred to those service users who had a property who did not want to sell it when they went into residential care.  The authority would receive income from the sale of the property after the person had died.  This ensured that the person did not have to sell their house in their lifetime.

·         There were a number of service areas with cost pressures, and it was queried whether any of them were cyclical or recurrent.  It was noted that there were built-in cost pressures into the next financial year.  Adult Social Care was approaching 50% of the Council's total budget. The authority had a lot of increasing financial risk.

·         Specialist Adult Services was seeing a recurring pressure and there were a number of factors which were resulting in this.  One of the issues was that a lot more people were presenting with autism and mental health was also causing an increasing pressure.  The budget was £5.8m but increased last year to £6.1m and was due to be increased to £6.2m the next financial year, however due to the pressures described in the report members had approved an additional £600k for mental health services.

·         In terms of Learning Disabilities there was a particular increase in capacity issues as there were a lot of young people who came into the county through the education system that were not known to the authority.

·         There was also an increasing complexity of needs, combined with medical advances so life expectancy for certain conditions was increasing.

·         There were cases where the service user had not been known to the authority as they had been taken care of by family members for their whole life but then they were no longer able to care for them.

·         It was noted that these were not local problems, as there was information from other authorities that they were experiencing the same issues.

·         It was noted that it cost £607k per day to run the adult social care service.

·         It was suggested that it would be useful to have a follow up of the lessons learned in terms of winter pressures, as the winter season was coming to an end.

RESOLVED

            That the budget outturn projection for Adult Care and Community Wellbeing for 2018/19 be noted.