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County's spending restrictions
WEST Sussex County Council has announced the initial stage of spending reductions that have to be made in this financial year after the Government's £1.1 billion cut in national grants to local government.
Leader of the Council, Louise Goldsmith said after a Cabinet meeting: "We recognise the Government has had to act urgently this year to start to bring the deficit under control. As part of that West Sussex has had to take reductions in grants from various funding streams totalling 12.7 million.
"We have been working incredibly hard for the last two weeks to see how we can manage these cuts without creating major problems for key services.
"In particular the County Council's Cabinet asked officers to try and safeguard the ambitious programme of road improvements that has started given the problems we had this winter, even though the Government has taken some 4 million from our highways grant.
"Because the Government has given local government more freedom in terms of using some grants by removing ring-fencing, I am pleased that we have able to achieve that.
"I am sure that the fact there will be no major reductions in highways spending this year will be welcomed by our residents because we know it is an area that has a high priority for them."
"However, we have had to make some tough choices in other areas and some services will have less funding for the remainder of this financial year.
"But, we have tried very hard to ensure it has the least possible impact on our customers and communities.
"There are still some areas that are being looked at, and we also need to consult key stakeholders before we can say where further savings will be made.
"There is a meeting tomorrow (Friday), for example, of the West Sussex Public Service Board when we will be discussing the areas where we are going to have to reduce spending because of national reductions in other grants.
"This has not been an easy exercise, and we want to ensure that we get it right."
Areas where there will be funding cuts during the rest of the financial year include:
Reductions of 1m will be made through efficiency savings and by use of uncommitted funding. Although this will reduce the ability of the County Council to respond to the unexpected, it is unlikely that this will have any impact on services for residents.
Savings of 0.7m will be made in collaboration with schools via the Schools Forum, and from Sure Start. This will result in less spending on school support activities and on early education and health and family support.
Savings of 1.1m will be made within the areas of Primary/Secondary Strategies, Advanced Skills Teachers and School Development Grants. These budgets support improvement in schools at risk of poor performance and encourage collaborative working between schools to share best practice.
Reduced levels of spending will be reprioritised to focus on schools at highest risk of failure, and on the provision of courses for young people at greatest risk of underachievement.
The overall impact is that there will be reduced expenditure on training and development work for school improvement and that schools will have to contribute more to improvement work from their own budgets.
Reductions of 0.2m will be made in grants supporting projects to improve school support for children and young people with special or additional education needs.
Savings from a recruitment freeze will contribute 400,000.
The County Council says that managers will be working closely with staff to decide how to keep the impact of the reduced funding to a minimum.
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Weather for Horsham
Thursday 09 February 2012
Today
Cloudy
Temperature: -1 C to 3 C
Wind Speed: 6 mph
Wind direction: North east
Tomorrow
Sunny spells
Temperature: -7 C to 2 C
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