South Staffordshire Council ends 2024/25 with £1m underspend
South Staffordshire Council ended the latest financial year with a budget underspend of more than £1 million, it has been revealed.
“Exceptional membership performance” across council leisure centres, digital services savings and lower than anticipated inflation impacting on the waste contract were among the factors that improved the authority’s financial position by the end of March.
The provisional outturn for 2024/25 means that the authority can now reduce the amount of General Fund reserves that would have been used to balance the books from £1.456m to £428,000, a report to Tuesday’s (July 8) cabinet meeting said. It added: “We are operating in an extraordinarily challenging financial environment, rising demand for services, escalating costs and limited funding.
“The provisional outturn for 2024/25 reports a surplus of £1.028m, an improvement of £406,000 since the Quarter 3 forecast of £622,000. This reduces the required use of General Fund reserves from the budgeted £1.456m to £0.428m.
“Key contributing factors include exceptional performance across leisure centres, part-year savings from the new insurance contract, treasury gains from sustained higher interest rates, and a lower-than-anticipated local government pay award. This improved position positively impacts the Medium-Term Financial Strategy (MTFS) approved in February 2025, increasing projected General Fund reserves at the end of 2027/28 from £1.540m to £1.946m.
“However, future funding remains uncertain, with reforms and a Business Rates reset scheduled for 2026/27. Further detail is expected following the June Spending Review.
“We generated £2,848,503 commercial income against our target of £2,959,500. The variance of £110,996 was due to a loss of rent at Unit 4E as construction was underway due to a fire.
“We continue to achieve a high commercial estate occupancy rate. The rate for Quarter 4 stood at 98 per cent and the team is working towards agreeing leases on the vacant units to achieve a 99 per cent occupancy rate in Quarter 1 25/26.”
During the past year the authority has also focused on economic growth, supporting residents to boost their career prospects, maintaining the district’s natural environment and enabling funding to improve living spaces. The report revealed that 51 properties received retrofit grant funding during the past financial year.
The report said: “During Quarter 4 we continued to empower our communities, our new customer portal was launched to enable residents to verify their benefit entitlements – 77 per cent of users were potentially missing out on welfare benefits. We maximised the Disabled Facilities Grant and made 230 adaptations to support residents to remain in their homes safely.
“UKSPF [UK Shared Prosperity Funding] has enabled the Creating Brighter Futures programme [to be] extended for another 12 months to support residents to increase their career prospects. Between April 2023 and March 2025, 425 residents have been supported and 265 individuals received funding to gain a qualification to improve their career prospects.
“We completed 10 open space improvement projects during Quarter 4. This work has included larger, long-term projects such as the installation of bollards on grass verges in Bilbrook, installation of new litter bins, installation of new posts, clearance of vegetation and work to tidy car parks.
“Performance for the Customer Promise has shown significant improvement for this final quarter compared to the same period last year. Calls waiting over 10 minutes reduced from 30 to just two, and calls waiting over 15 minutes dropped from 19 to only one.
“Overall, we have made good progress against all priorities in the Council Plan and are in a good, strong position to deal with the challenges/opportunities in 2025/26.”
