Introduction

The council is required to set its budget each year based on:

• available funding
• the cost of services
• any required savings to achieve a balanced budget.

Each service area receives a proportion of this budget to deliver its services effectively.

Who is this section for

If you are a budget manager, you are responsible for managing the budget for your service area. This section will help you to:

• understand the basics of budgeting
• learn about our current budget issues
• understand our approach and the reasons for this
• know your role and the guidance available to you
• consider key principles when making spending decisions
• learn about business partnering and the support available.

Budget basics

This toolkit provides a basic insight into:

• what a budget is
• why budgets are needed
• types of budgets
• how to mitigate risk
• factors that can influence budgets.

Budget issues

Our service budgets are currently in deficit, and we all have a part to play in bringing spending back on track. To protect our financial health and ability to deliver quality service, it’s important that we work together to reduce this shortfall. 

Make sure you and your teams follow the spending controls in place and only spend where it’s essential. To support this we have introduced a number of measures, including a:

• set of guiding principles on essential spending
• financial recovery plan to tackle our budget shortfall. This targets:
  • third-party spend
  • commercial activity
  • efficiency and productivity
  • stopping, reducing, or pausing services
• spend control process to review all purchases over £2,000 before orders are placed to help eliminate non-essential spend.

Our approach

Our approach is to empower you as budget managers, as experts within your service areas, to take greater ownership in setting and managing your budgets. You know best how potential changes or reductions could impact both the finances and the delivery of vital services for our residents.

We want budget managers to play a leading role in identifying where savings and improvements could be made and follow a business partnering approach to enable this.