Members are requested to bring the Member’s Information Pack with them to the meeting.

The Cabinet Member for Finance and Corporate Services described the Councils aim of bringing forward a balanced and sustainable budget. These budget updates, growth proposals and savings proposals before Members tonight are robust, reasonable, and sustainable.

The Interim Director of Finance and Digital gave an overview of the current position that is outlined in the October and December Cabinet papers. The information in the January Cabinet papers will be discussed at the Overview & Scrutiny Commission.

Looking at the December position, you can see at that time we still had a gap in the budget for 23/24 of some £4.3 million. We have since benefited from some gains, in terms of the increased council tax base and the reversal of the government's decision to increase National Insurance for contributions for the social care levy and we also benefited from some good returns from our Pension Fund Investments.

In response to questions:

All public sector workers should be receiving decent pay settlements, given the situation with inflation, but it is a difficult position. The pay settlement that has been agreed, it obviously applies to Merton Council staff, but it is a nationally negotiated position across the local government sector.

We have taken a lot of steps to support our residents with the cost-of-living crisis and we have been clear that we wish to support staff too.

A Panel Member invited the Cabinet Members, whose responsibilities report to this panel, to comment on how the budget proposals set out in this paper reflect their priorities.

·         The Cabinet Member for Local Environment and Green Spaces highlighted the growth bid around sorting out flats above shops. We are proposing to standardise those time bands, bolster the comms for those flats and put on two time-banded collections every single week so that those flats have more collections because they have less space for storage.

·         The Cabinet Member for Transport described his strategy throughout the budget is to promote active travel, air quality and have an EV strategy that will get us to 2030.

We are looking at the staffing arrangements for development management building control and they've taken on us as a sizeable number of additional staff um part of in terms of the savings, if we can bring in people within the growth element then we will increase our income in pre-applications in the savings element.

In terms of the overall complaints about fly tipping - the annual figures still remain high in terms of what the public are reporting. The evening economy crew (which is the pilot for this growth bid) is able to mitigate a large number of potential complaints that that may be forthcoming.

Attendance at leisure centres has dramatically increased.

Following the continued commercial success of the annual fireworks event in Wimbledon and Morden Park, with year-on-year increases in the income generated by this event, the Public Space Team feel confident that they can develop further improvements in income generation during the annual event. The service is conscious that significant increases in the ticket prices does have an impact on communities who enjoy this activity and we have endeavoured to maintain a high-quality offer with acceptable ticket pricing for visitors to keep pace with the cost of external providers and event management.

The Panel had no recommendations to send to the Overview and Scrutiny Commission.