BCP Council leader warns of service cuts or face bankruptcy

That is the stark warning from the leader of BCP Council about the “very difficult time” ahead for the local authority’s finances.

Cllr Vikki Slade said the Three Towns Alliance administration had to be honest with the public.

She said the decisions that will have to be taken will “hurt”.

Council chief executive Graham Farrant said the forecasted £45m funding gap for 2024/25 equated to a 15 per cent cut in all services.

He said this could not take place in all areas so there would need to be "hard" conversations.

Liberal Democrat Cllr Slade told the Daily Echo: “The past three budgets burnt through £100m of reserves.

“That was living outside their means, overspending the budget year on year by £30m to £35m every year.

Bournemouth Town Hall (Image: Echo)

“Difficult decisions that should have been taken in February 2021, 2022 and 2023 weren’t taken and council tax wasn’t put up which is the government’s mechanism for letting us fund increasing cost.

“Now we are in a position where there is no money left. There isn’t enough money in the reserves to keeping doing that. We are going to have to take the decisions that should have been taken one, two or three years ago and we are going to have to take them much more quickly.”

The three budgets Cllr Slade referred to were in the period the authority was run by the Conservative administration.

The council 'froze' the core council tax in 2022 but increased it by the maximum amount this year following a warning from Government.

Cllr Slade said cabinet members and the council’s corporate management board were meeting on a fortnightly basis to pick the financial approach apart to understand how the budget got to its current state.

Cllr Slade said this allowed the administration to be “a lot more transparent about what the difficult decisions that we are going to have to make are”.

“As a top team on the political side it is a really horrible place to be because we are going to get blamed for having to make cuts that somebody else should have had the honesty and the bravery to do in the past but they didn’t,” Cllr Slade said.

“We are going to have to do it and I’m sure we are going to get pilloried for it but the alternative is the council goes bankrupt and if the council goes bankrupt, we have to make those cuts but someone else decides and those cuts are even worse.”

Chief executive Graham Farrant said: “My summary of the budget is council tax goes up by five per cent and inflation is running at 10 per cent.

"On a £300m budget that five per cent is a £15m gap and if we put £30m of reserves into the budget this year and we haven’t got those next year that’s £30m to add, so £45m or thereabouts shouldn’t come as a surprise to anybody.

“That is exactly where we are and it is caused by council tax doesn’t go up by inflation, our costs go up by inflation, we were using reserves, we don’t have any more reserves.

BCP Council chief executive Graham Farrant (Image: Richard Crease)

“In a simple nutshell, you would expect us to have a £45m gap but on a £300m net budget that means a 15 per cent cut in all services.

"That cannot be done in all areas, so we have to have a conversation about which services can’t we do and that’s going to be hard.”

He said this forecast was assuming transformation delivered no savings.

“Transformation is about driving efficiency through the organisation,” Mr Farrant added. “How much of that (financial gap) can we make up by efficiency and how quickly?”

The senior officer said this included getting more digitally accessible, providing more self-service, helping people more efficiently, getting rid of the boundaries between services and getting all of the new systems behind that in place.