Council faces ‘dire’ financial outlook

Richard Evans, local democracy reporter

A cash strapped council has revealed it is currently facing a £22m black hole for the next financial year.

At a cabinet meeting this week, Conwy’s cabinet discussed a report setting out the budget for 2025/26.

As it currently stands, Conwy is facing a resource shortfall of £22.771m.

The report states that the outlook is just a prediction and that the budget will become clearer over the coming months.

Critical to this is the announcement of the provisional Local Government Settlement in December, which will indicate whether the council can expect any additional funding.

Shortfall

Speaking in the chamber at Bodlondeb, leader Cllr Charlie McCoubrey said: “You will be acutely aware that once again we face an incredibly difficult budget situation. The resource shortfall at the moment is estimated at £22.7m.

“On the back of years of austerity and years of cuts, we all know that increasingly this gets more and more difficult to be able to offer the services that our residents want whilst fulfilling our legal duty to bring forward a balanced budget every year.

“To meet the challenge ahead of us will be incredibly difficult, and we have to look at everything in the round.”

He added: “Much of the situation is still uncertain in terms of the UK Government’s announcement on 30 October about the budget, which will set the tone for funding for Welsh Government.”

‘Dire’

Cllr Julie Fallon said that the situation was ‘dire’ but similar across the UK, but she added she hoped the new UK Government would find extra money.

“It is incredibly difficult, and we are going to have to work incredibly hard to look at ways of finding a way through, and I guess we politically need to find a way to lobby so things are funded appropriately,” she said.

Cllr Fallon then added that other authorities receive more money even though Conwy has unique problems that should be recognised such as the county’s older population, which has financial consequences.

She added: “The situation is worse than I’ve ever known.”

Social care costs

Cllr McCoubrey then said social care costs were being kicked down the road and that the authority was dealing with post-COVID problems at schools which cost money.

“We are getting less and less money but are being asked to do more and more,” he said.

“We are not law makers. We are law takers. We have statutory duties we have to fulfil, and we don’t set pay for our staff. Nobody begrudges anyone being paid properly, but there are lots of moving parts that we have no control over, but ultimately we are held completely responsible for setting a balanced budget, and we are held responsible for it by our residents for council tax that we set, and those are incredibly difficult things to balance, but we will soldier on.

“But we’ve worked really hard the last couple of years with our officers together, and we will continue to do the same for our residents.”

Cabinet agreed to back the report and noted the scale of the potential funding gap in planning for the 2025/26 budget, ‘whilst accepting that, in the current context, financial planning continues to be extremely difficult’.