Political Opinion: A year of identifying savings and building sound financial foundations

I described this as a journey when I stood up at the full council meeting in February to introduce the budget for 2026-27.

I referred to my own business experience, and the new cohort of councillors, and how we would look at continuing to meet the demands of our communities whilst spending taxpayers’ money effectively and wisely.

When I took this privileged position last May, I inherited a funding gap of £18.5m and from what I could see, there were no plans on how that gap would be closed.

By October, we discovered that this funding gap was understated by £43.1m, with the true picture materialising as a gap of £61.6m, which was also relying on using nearly £28m of reserves.

The cabinet efficiency working group identified savings and measures we needed to put in place to balance the books.

I recognised that we needed to identify and implement in-year efficiencies, together with strengthening financial management, procurement, and contract oversight.

In-year savings have included £3m savings in the use of agency staff and £1m on pension fund management fees.

But this is more about changing the culture where every decision to spend money starts with what are we trying to achieve and can we do this more efficiently.

A few examples include saving £80,000 on clinical waste disposal costs, £23,000 on the purchase of vehicles, £43,000 on language services and £120,000 on ICT cloud-based services, through to £1.8m on internalising some adult care services.

I identified £45m of savings and efficiencies, concentrating efforts on prevention services.

By supporting families and the most vulnerable adults and children in our communities early we help to reduce the demand for council services at a later stage.

So, the focus was firmly on support for children, families, adults with disabilities and older people, whilst at the same time looking to transform our services by working more collaboratively with public sector partners and making more efficient use of our collective financial resource.

The chronic underfunding of SEND services has been an issue nationally for some years, as we know the per head funding in Nottinghamshire has always been less than other councils.

Meeting needs will result in an overspend on the High Needs Block of £37m this year.

The Government has promised reform and recently announced some funding towards the accumulated deficits but there’s still no news on tackling the ongoing shortfall in funding or the long-awaited reform of SEND.

Unfortunately, this will continue to feel like a ticking fiscal timebomb for some time to come.

I am pleased that this administration has successfully lobbied for more funding for our highways, and we recently announced a record breaking £180m investment in the county’s roads for 2026-27.

We’re determined to get our roads to an acceptable standard that our residents deserve, so it’s unquestionably one of our key priorities.

This is very much a team effort, with the leader, cabinet colleagues and officers working to improve the lives of our residents.

Using my 50 years’ experience in business, I am proud that I’ve improved the fiscal discipline of this authority.

My mission is to look at changing the culture, saving money where we can, transforming our services and delivering a sound financial future for this council.