To advise the Committee of the financial position for the Adult Social Care budget within the Joint Commissioning Directorate, and the Strategic Housing budget within the Regeneration Directorate for the period to 31 May 2010.  The report provides the variations against budget and a projected outturn for the year.

The Committee received the Budget Monitoring Report of the financial position for Adult Social Care and Strategic Housing revenue budgets for the period to 31^st March 2010.     In the ensuing discussion the following points were made:

The Principal Accountant reported that the outturn position showed an overspend of £2,731k. There had been a number of reasons for this:

• There were twelve more clients with complex needs within learning disabilities and an increase in clients coming into the service taking up direct payments. This meant that the learning disability outturn had the majority of overspend of £1,414k.

• There was also an increased number of older people clients, as well as existing clients who were presenting with increased homecare needs. 

• The impact of severe weather had led to an increase in the number of clients being admitted to hospital which had provided social care with additional cost pressures. The overspend for older people was £1.14m.

The management team has put in a number of measures to tackle the overspend delivering £1.473m of savings. These included the one-off use of the supporting people grant of £800k.  The final outturn had been offset by the Social Care contingency with the remainder of the overspend being offset by underspends in other Directorate There is no deficit carried forward into 2010/11.

Budgets had been re-aligned in order to reflect existing commitments so that Panel are clear on the available budgets. Panel commence the year with adequate resources.  This approach resulted is an overall shortfall of £3.5m for integrated commissioning that must be addressed through further efficiency measures and service re-design  Progress is being monitored on a monthly basis within the recovery plan.

The Independent Living Fund (ILF) have recently announced that they will not be accepting any new claims for 2010/11 in order to protect those receiving funding as the budget has now been fully committed.  The claims currently accepted for approval total £20k.  Claims will only be honoured where an offer letter has been sent.

The Associate Director, Joint Commissioning, said that the situation was far from ideal.  It had been complicated by ten learning disabilities cases which had been transferred from Children’s Services to Adult Social Care at a cost of £100k each per annum.  This meant that the Service would have to deal with an additional spend of £1m a year for the next ten years.  As a result, it would be increasingly difficult to balance the budget in 2010/11.

In reply to a question, the Associate Director went on to say that the finance package designed to dovetail to Frameworki would be in place by the Autumn.  The Electronic Homecare System was already in place, but did not function without the correct finance IT system.

Resolved

That:

a)      The report be noted;

b)     The Committee noted that, despite regular assurances that the suitable accounting mechanisms for the Frameworki package would be available, its implementation was still awaited.  Given the extreme pressures on the Adult Social Care budget it is imperative that the Directorate should have this tool available so that immediate budgetary management is made possible; and;

c)      The Committee welcomes the realignment of budgets, on the assumption that they will now be sufficient to cope with the number of clients with acute needs that the Service has to deal with.