A cash-strapped council overspent its budget by more than £10 million last year. Stoke-on-Trent City Council's financial performance report for 2023/24 shows a net overspend of £10.5 million, mostly due to the cost of placements for children in care.

The authority also spent an extra £10 million on measures aimed at improving its dire financial situation – including £4 million on redundancy pay-offs. Both of these will be funded through £20.5 million from the council's Exceptional Financial Support (EFS) package, which the government agreed to earlier this year.

Children's services continues to be the area of the council's work seeing the most pressure, with a £12.9 million overspend last year. The number of children in care in Stoke-on-Trent rose to a record 1,158 by the end of March, with some of these youngsters in high cost placements due to 'significant complexities of need'.

The report says the rising costs of private sector placements are 'extremely challenging', but in line with national trends. A smaller overspend of £1.8 million was seen in adult social care, while the nationally agreed pay rise for council staff cost the authority £400,000 last year.

The report showed the overspend was mostly due to the cost of placements for children in care (Nub News).

The report states: "The city council continues to adapt to new ways of working, streamlining and transforming services to provide the most effective and efficient services for residents. However, spending within current funding levels continues to prove very challenging as a result of high inflation and increased demand for services, as it does across the wider local government sector.

"There continues to be increased emphasis on having robust financial discipline in place in order to safeguard the city council's medium-term financial position, this has been monitored closely over the financial year. Urgent actions had been taken by management to reduce the impact on this and future years."

The city council was given a total of £42.2 million in EFS – effectively permission to borrow that amount in order to balance the budget and invest in money-saving projects.

In addition to the £4 million on redundancies, the £10 million of additional spending in 2023/24 included £3 million of investment into early help and targeted support in children's services, with the aim of reducing expenditure on care placements. And a further £3 million was paid into the general reserve to bring it up to the 'absolute minimum' needed to ensure financial resilience.

According to the report, the use of the EFS in 2023/24 was in line with the council's request to government, with the remaining £21.7 million due to spent in the current financial year.

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