Councils 'struggling to budget' as Government grants arrive in 'fits and starts'

Government grants coming to local authorities in “fits and starts” is making budgeting “extremely difficult”, a council leader has said.

Chris Boden (Conservatives) told councillors that Fenland District Council (FDC) doesn't know how much money it'll receive from "one month to the next".

It doesn't even know how much in it'll receive in total this financial year, he added – which ends in April.

“We still don’t know, possibly to the tune of hundreds of thousands, certainly tens of thousands, how much money we’ll receive for this year, 2022-23, let alone next year,” he said at an FDC meeting in February.

Similar concerns have been raised at Peterborough City Council (PCC), with Cllr Andy Coles (Conservatives) listing “uncertainty around future government funding” as a financial risk when discussing its budget and medium-term financial strategy (MTFS).

Peterborough City Council document says it’s ‘difficult to plan long-term’

That document, the MTFS, states that there is “uncertainty for the future in relation to funding levels [...] making it difficult to plan with certainty in the long-term”.

It adds that “core Government grants increase much slower than demand and rates inflation”.

Back in Fenland, Cllr Boden put it more simply: “From one year to the next, even at the moment from one month to the next, we don’t know how much money we’re going to get from central Government.

“It comes in fits and starts; it comes with relatively short notice and it can be really, really difficult to budget a year in advance.”

Government funding has become ‘less and less budgetable’

In another FDC meeting, he said that the funding has become “less and less predictable therefore less and less budgetable over the years”.

He continued: “It’s now very difficult indeed for us to properly budget the amount of money we’re going to receive from central Government in the forthcoming year.

“In fact, we don’t even know at the moment how much money we’ll receive in the current financial year and we’ve only got six weeks left. So it does make it extremely difficult.”