“Unauthorised” spending in council department that ended year with £826k deficit

The issue is “now being dealt with internally”, a senior councillor said at a meeting on Tuesday – and he added that the money “may have been spent in a way to reduce the huge backlog” of planning applications the authority has been dealing with.

The council’s deficit at the end of 2023 was revealed at the cabinet’s July meeting, where it was reported that there had been an £826,000 “unfavourable variance” in planning and regeneration. Reserve funds are being used to close the financial gap.

At Tuesday’s full council meeting on July 30, opposition group leader Jeremy Pert asked questions about the deficit.

He said: “At July’s cabinet meeting the papers indicated the budget manager had been spoken to in respect of the position to ensure it will not happen again, and if any issues arise they will be raised earlier so they can be managed more easily.

“We’re not talking about a few quid at the back of the sofa. It’s an overspend of £826,000 on a budget of £1.695m – that’s nearly 50 per cent overspend.

“So for every pound they were given they spent £1.50. My question is, given that the budget manager has been spoken to, and this only came to light in month nine (December), and it took seven months to come to council, has the cabinet member also been spoken to given he was clearly oblivious to what was going on under his watch?”

Councillor Ralph Cooke, cabinet member for resources, responded: “We have had problems and we have spoken to one of the senior officers. That should never have happened.

“In any organisation no officer should be spending without authorisation – that was without authorisation. It may have been spent in a way to reduce the huge backlog (of planning applications) which had built up from the previous administration, but there should have been notification that this was being done and that is being dealt with internally.

“The finance department, due to staffing problems, were under a great deal of pressure doing all sorts of things. The Chief Finance Officer was also Deputy Returning Officer and we’ve had two elections this year, which was even more additional work piled on people who are already heavily encumbered by all sorts of things they have to do without the staff to do it.”

At the July cabinet meeting members were told that the majority of additional costs in development and planning related to staffing. On Tuesday, Councillor Cooke said:”We could say, in the end the fault lies with the previous administration (that were in control of the council until May 2023), for not putting into place enough staffing to do all the things we need to do in this council.

“We repeatedly warned them over the years to consider staffing levels but they cut these whenever they could, because their idee fixe was to keep the council tax as low as possible, despite the damage to staffing levels. This administration needed to tackle the historic backlog of planning applications as a priority.

“We’ve succeeded in reducing the planning backlog by more than half, from 946 outstanding applications when we took over (in May 2023) to about 442 now – and we need to reduce this further. But we had to spend to reduce this total.

“The planning team has struggled to fill vacancies due to wider national shortages of experienced planners so we have had to use agency staff and external consultants to undertake the work. They cost a lot more and do not come cheap.

“This authority has also recently suffered a highly critical report from the external auditor for the financial years 2021/22 and 2022/23 – that was during the Conservatives’ later period in office. Much of this resulted from staffing pressures and shortages and we are also having to pick up the pieces in this case