Agenda, decisions and draft minutes

The Chair welcomed everyone to the meeting.

The Chair welcomed everyone to the meeting.

There were no declarations of interest received.

There were no declarations of interest received.

Following scrutiny, the committee noted the report

The Chair advised members that the budget savings proposals that fell under the remit of the committee would be scrutinised; comments from the meeting would form part of the formal budget consultation response. Members were encouraged to put forward alternative proposals which would be considered following the end of the consultation period.

The Director of Social Services, Health and Housing, advised members that it had been difficult to identify the proposed savings, due to the amount of savings required in previous years, and the challenges of additional and increasingly complex demands on services. The required savings amounted to £5.4m, and it was not possible to remove this amount from the budget, without having an impact on services. It was important that members understood the impacts of making these savings. The Director advised members that there was no real opportunity to reduce costs by negotiating with residential and domiciliary care providers. Any reduction in staffing, needed to be carefully considered; reducing staff will present risks. Therefore, any proposals around staff reduction would be small scale due to the high risks involved. The early intervention and prevention work needed to be maintained to identify emerging needs.

Each Head of Service outlined the savings and income generation proposals, under each budget line of the report in the agenda pack:

Reference SSH&CS-A: The Head of Housing and Communities advised members that there were a number of proposals that focused on improving services for those that require homelessness support from the council. Full detail of the proposals are not included in the report as the proposals are yet to go through the official decision making process. Confidence is held that the required 5% saving target is achievable, but concern is held over the additional cost of meeting the rising demand for temporary accommodation. It is disappointing the number of households in temporary accommodation has increased from around 200 to 250 households, despite the work of the homelessness team to prevent over 70% of the people who contact the service from becoming homeless.  Due to a lack of temporary accommodation options, there is an increased usage of bed and breakfast accommodation at an increased cost to the authority (£3.6m in this financial year). It was noted that there is no additional funding to meet the rising demand and costs. The Head of Service confirmed that families are only housed in bed and breakfast accommodation on a short term basis, whilst more appropriate temporary accommodation is identified. The average number of days that a family stays in temporary accommodation has reduced from 128 days in 2023/24 to 84 days. A challenge faced by the service is the number of single people in temporary accommodation which accounts for 80% of all homeless households. Over the last eighteen months, 21 households were in accommodation for over twelve months and 225 households were in temporary accommodation for between nine and twelve months.

Members asked for further clarification regarding the amount of housing units that local authorities are allowed to  ...  view the full minutes text for item 3.

There were no urgent items.

There were no urgent items.