Agenda and minutes

The Joint Executive Advisory Board nominated and seconded Councillor Adrian Chandler to act as Chairman for the meeting and Councillor Jenny Wicks as Vice-Chairman.

The following apologies for absence had been received from Councillors Nils Christiansen, Liz Hogger, Nigel Kearse, Julia McShane, Tony Phillips, Pauline Searle and David Wright.  In accordance with Procedure Rule 23(j), Councillors Colin Cross, Gillian Harwood and Caroline Reeves acted as substitutes for Councillors Tony Phillips, Pauline Searle and Liz Hogger. 

In relation to the Citizen Advice Bureau (CAB) Bid, Councillor Chandler declared a potential issue of perceived bias by virtue of the fact that members of his family have used CAB.

Councillor Gordon Jackson also declared a potential issue of perceived bias by virtue of the fact that he was the Chairman of the Ash CAB. 

Webcast Announcement

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The Lead Councillor for Finance and Asset Management introduced the General Fund outline budget for 2018-19 to the Joint Executive Advisory Board (JEAB).  It was noted that the report was the second report in the 2017-18 budget cycle; the first being the report on business planning assumptions presented to Executive in July that set the parameters within which officers would prepare the outline budget.  The same parameters were stated in paragraph 3.1 of the report.

The report gave a position statement on the outline budget, prior to the final budget report coming to the Executive in January 2018 and Council in February 2018

The local government finance settlement and any announcement as to whether Surrey would be a pilot for the new business rates retention scheme would not be made by government until the middle of December therefore the budget was anticipated to change between now and January/February. 

2018-19 would be the first year that Guildford Borough Council received no revenue support grant from government and that in 2019-20 we would be paying the government ‘an additional tariff’ from our business rates, or ‘negative grant’.  The context of preparing a budget in the face of a ‘no government grant’ had been and would remain challenging.  Guildford Borough Council was completely reliant on locally raised income now.  The outlook for the future was equally challenging as there were significant changes planned to the system of local government finance post 2020 and very little detail so far, on what those changes would look like.  The transformation programme, led by the Transformation Board would need to work hard over the next few years to identify the savings and efficiencies needed to balance the budget over the medium term.

The outline budget assumed an increase in the Borough council’s Band D Council Tax of £5, although this represented a percentage increase of 3.1% it was less than 10p per week per household.  Guildford Borough Council can choose to change this assumption however, even with the suggested increase there was currently still a budget gap of £1.4 million to find before the budget was balanced.  The impact of the proposed increases in fees and charges set out in Appendix 5 of the report and the additional income generated was included within the figures.  It was still early in the budget process and officers continued to work on the numbers, however, proposals on how to do this were included in paragraph 11.20.  The JEAB and Executivewere invited to comment on the proposals.

An analysis of how the 2018-19 outline budget had changed from the 2017-18 budget was stated in paragraph 11.7 and Appendix 3.  TheJEAB and Executive were invited to comment on the changes at service level.

The report included details of growth bids and savings proposals made by officers at Appendix 4.  A business planning evaluation panel consisting of the Officer Corporate Management Team and Finance Team had evaluated the bids against a matrix to assess how they supported the Corporate Plan,  ...  view the full minutes text for item 5.