By Joe Locker, Local Democracy Reporter
Nottingham City Council is planning to review thousands of adult social care packages and run its museums under a charitable trust as it looks to set a balanced budget next year.
Each year the council publishes a report on how it aims to set a balanced budget, including savings needed to help fill gaps in its finances.
The Labour-run authority most recently said it was facing a £69m gap in its budget in the year beginning April 2025.
A report published on Monday (December 9) has revealed a raft of new savings and cuts totalling £24.191m to 2028/29, with £17.91m to be delivered in 2025/26.
Cllr Neghat Khan (Lab), the leader of the council, said many of the proposed savings will be made in the “back office”, and that the budget for 2025/26 is about “getting our house in order”.
“We continue to face huge pressures in caring for the elderly and disabled, supporting families and looking after children in our care, and homelessness,” she said in a statement.
“Together these pressures are squeezing out other services. This is not an excuse – we know that delivering statutory services to some of our most vulnerable people is our duty as custodians of this city, but what that means is we have stretched our budget and must decide how best to allocate that limited funding.
“The budget is about getting our house in order and moving the council to a sustainable financial future.”
While the exact budget gap for the next year has not been published, the council most recently said it was facing a £69m black hole, rising to a cumulative total of £172m over the next three years.
The proposals in the report include a review of one-to-one and two-to-one support hours for those receiving help from adult social care services, to save £428,000 next year.
High-cost packages of care will also undergo a review to save £270,000 alongside a review of social care transport to save £250,000.
Over a two-year period to the the end of 2023, more than 7,000 people received support from adult social care services.
Deputy leader of the council, Cllr Ethan Radford, admitted the plans could create uncertainty but said reviews were needed to make sure people were getting the right care.
The proposals also reveal the council’s museums service will be run under a “charitable development trust and exhibitions company”.
The service currently directly runs Wollaton Hall, Newstead Abbey, Nottingham Industrial Museum, the Museum of Nottingham Life and Nottingham Castle.
Documents say the new model will “secure financial sustainability by increasing revenue and reduce operating costs”, with savings in the region of £1.150m between 2025/26 and 2028/29.
However concerns have before been raised by city councillors that the model could prove “a slippery slope towards privatisation”.
More savings will be made by reducing the money provided to sports and leisure facilities, largely by reducing vacant staffing posts.
There will also be a “revised events programme” with the aim of making events such as the Riverside Festival “cost neutral”.
The largest savings, totalling £10.8m in 2025/26 and £16.1m up to 2028/29, will be made across the wider council by “streamlining layers of management and team sizes”, reducing sickness rates and reducing third-party costs.
The impact on staffing numbers has not yet be revealed, but these measures will require public consultation.
In November last year the council in effect declared bankruptcy after it was unable to set a balanced budget.
A few months later in March the authority agreed on cuts to youth services and care homes, a review of its libraries, charges for public toilets and the end of water features in Old Market Square, which all led to the loss of more than 500 jobs.
Even with the savings the budget gap could only be filled through the use of Exceptional Financial Support (EFS); an accounting mechanism granted by the Government which lets the council use money from property sales to fund day-to-day costs.
Money from asset sales is now being used to ‘pay back’ up to £65m in EFS, which helped the council set a balanced budget in 2023/24 and 2024/25.
Cllr Khan admitted it is “more than likely” the council will require EFS up until 2027.
Unlike previous years, council tax for the next financial year, from April, will not be decided until January, by which time the authority will understand how much funding it will be getting from the Government.
At the same time the authority will also announce changes to the council tax support scheme.
The scheme supports working-age residents on low incomes by covering up to 80 per cent of their council tax bill, however the council is currently consulting on reducing this figure to as low as 30 per cent.
Around 19 per cent of the city’s residents get support from the scheme, which costs more than £30 million a year.
A consultation on the scheme will end on December 16.
The consultation on the new budget proposals will then begin from December 17, when councillors consider the report at a meeting of the executive.
