The Council's published 'Financial Plans and Supporting Information 2019/20' shows, in Annex A, in the table entitled 'Commitment Budget - Transformation Savings 2019/20 to 2021/22', a total reduction of £3,600,000 marked 'AdultsTransformation', also a total reduction of £1,914,000 marked 'ChildrensTransformation' through budget years 2018/19 to 2021/2022. May I take the Council's written and itemised breakdown of these figures, showing specifically from which Council departments and external services you have chosen to withdraw support, and how much from each please?
For reference the document can be found here and the chart is on page 24.
Minutes:
The Council's published 'Financial Plans and Supporting Information 2019/20' shows, in Annex A, in the table entitled 'Commitment Budget - Transformation Savings 2019/20 to 2021/22', a total reduction of £3,600,000 marked 'AdultsTransformation', also a total reduction of £1,914,000 marked 'ChildrensTransformation' through budget years 2018/19 to 2021/2022. May I take the Council's written and itemised breakdown of these figures, showing specifically from which Council departments and external services you have chosen to withdraw support, and how much from each please?
In response Councillor Heydon, Executive Member for Transformation and Finance explained that it was a complex answer, the Council was committed to providing the support needed to help the most vulnerable children and adults in Bracknell Forest but recognised that the way in which they are supported needed to change. He explained that the Council did this by putting in place social care services that were appropriate to individuals’ needs. The Council provided and commissioned those services from a wide variety of organisations, occasionally using block contracts for things like domiciliary care, more often using individual contracts related to a specific person’s needs.
Councillor Heydon stated that Transformation savings did not necessarily mean cutting services but instead about doing things differently with an emphasis on quality not quantity. The specific areas of change were identified and the likely potential financial impact of each of these was estimated. However, he explained that it was recognised that few parts of these complex systems work in isolation, that one change could potentially impact on another and the timing of the financial impact of any change was very difficult to predict. He stated that the Council deliberately did not include in the published budget plans a detailed breakdown of the individual changes.
He explained that the “financial plans and budgets supporting information” document for the 2020/21 financial year included no assumed Transformation savings from either programme beyond 2019/20 and the previous year’s target had therefore been reduced by £1.2m. The Council was working on future areas of focus, but these had not yet been firmed up or accurately quantified.
He concluded that whatever savings were achieved through Transformation would potentially be counteracted by the increasing level of demand for social care services and that in 2020/21 the Council would be spending £6m more on social care services than in 2018/19, when the Transformation programme started.
In response to Mr T Neill’s supplementary questions Councillor Heydon responded that there were multiple interlocking projects within the programme and it would be counterproductive to produce this. Councillor Birch, Executive Member for Adult Social Care, Health and Housing replied that a strength-based approach was used to identify the positive impacts that could be made. He added that no one that was assessed as having a level of care received anything less than what they are entitled to. Instead the projects found new and better, joined up ways of doing delivering this to improve outcomes for Bracknell Forest residents.