North Northants Council dips into reserves to plug £9 million gap in 2023/24 budget

North Northamptonshire Council (NNC) has had to raid its reserves to finish the 2023/24 financial year on budget and settle a £9 million overspend.

The main pressures on the council's £339m budget for the year came from demand-led services, with a £26.3m overspend arising from children and adults' services alone. Despite recovering savings from other departments to ease the budget pressures, the gap wasn't able to be filled completely, leaving £9.23m unaccounted for.

Cllr Lloyd Bunday, NNC's executive member for finance, said: "In order to help safeguard the financial position of this council, remedies have been sought to offset the forecast overspend.

"The council has a contingency budget and reserves available to call on to help fund these pressures, but has looked to achieve alternative mitigations in the first instance before these are applied."

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According to the papers read at the executive meeting on Thursday (June 13), the council had budgeted to use reserves of £8.79m in 2023/24 but had to increase this figure by half a million pounds to properly account for the end-of-year overspend.

The Northamptonshire Children's Trust (NCT) represented the single biggest cost to the authority, spending £14.3 million over budget.

Leader of NNC, Cllr Jason Smithers, said: "There’s always this focus upon the Children’s Trust and the pressures coming from there.

"We should be monitoring what’s being spent there, however, rather than just monitoring financial figures we should also be monitoring the outcomes of what’s going on with the children that the Trust keep safe day in, day out.

"We are starting to see those overspends dropping. I have absolutely every faith in the Trust to try to do everything they can to mitigate those costs."