To recommend to Council for approval the revised capital investment budget for 2023/24 onwards.

Cabinet Members considered a report setting out the revised budget for 2023/24 to recommend to Council. 

The Cabinet member for Finance and Corporate Services introduced the report and highlighted:

Investments in the market towns, rural areas, deterioration and condition of the roads.

It will continue to deliver on the ambition of the Council to achieve net zero by 2030 and investment of over £20m in active travel and renewables to support this in the 2024/25 budget.

Delivery of the current Capital Programme 2023/24 is progressing well.  The demonstration centre at Hillside is due to be completed this year and the program of property investment and maintenance of schools are all on target to complete during 2023 and 2024.

Six schools have benefited from installation of solar PV and retrofitting of fuel C households is ongoing.  EV infrastructure is being rolled out and continued investment in wetlands.

A number of changes are proposed due to no funds being assigned to them, these are:

The passenger transport plan, Masters House phase two and the Herefordshire retrofit hub. Confirmed that should appropriate grants be made available then these projects will be reviewed. 

A review took place of existing projects to free up funding these were;

-         Removal of £2m funding for super hubs based on officer’s advice that community hubs are being reviewed and investment at this time would be not be appropriate. 

-         Removal of the development partnership activities budget which frees up £10.2m of corporate borrowing and reserves. 

-          The ‘my account’ budget of £0.4m was underspent in phase one and no projects have come forward for phase two, the budget will be re-allocated. 

-         The BT Fastershire project is coming to an end and will release £5m of corporate borrowing.  It will be replaced by project ‘gigabit’ which is fully funded and run by PD UK.

£17.6m of funding has been made available and can be re-allocated. Combined with £14.2m of unallocated capital receipts, which has been unallocated for 4 years, allows £31.8m to be made available.

New projects were proposed to be added to the capital programme review;

-         The Southern Link Road (SLR) for £12.3m to address congestion of A49. 

-         £3m for the proposal to relocate the library to the Shirehall to fund improvement works to enable the historic building to be opened. 

-         £0.1m to conduct the necessary works to create a care leavers base in the Shirehall annex.

-         £10m to improve the road network to resurface the Highways network. This is in addition to the £2.558m pothole fund and £4.85 highway investment.

-         The Cabinet member set out that they will improve the economy of Herefordshire by working with local partners and businesses.  Confirmed these projects will have no effect on the capital or revenue budgets.

-         Employment land and incubation space. Made up using £7.2m of existing funding and an additional £4.8m from the capital receipt balance.

The local government financial settlement allowed local authorities to use capital receipts to fund transformational expenditure,  ...  view the full minutes text for item 36