Lambeth council to hike service charges as £25m in savings needed next year

By Robert Firth, Local Democracy Reporter

Lambeth residents are set to face increased charges for council services as officials scramble to find £25million in cuts next year.

The council has to find £38million in savings over the next four years – more than it spends on recycling, libraries, parks, children’s centres and community safety combined – with a big chunk of that due to be found over the next financial year, or else the council faces overspending by £24.6million in 2023/24.

Officials have drawn up plans for around £35.5million of the savings over the four-year period already, including £13.6million through hiking the price of existing services and introducing new chargeable services.

The council hasn’t specified which services could see a price rise but examples of chargeable services include garden waste collections and pest control. The planned savings are revealed in a report about the council’s finance planning until 2028.

Proposals to raise extra cash include increasing income from planning service fees, changes to parking fines and the introduction of a landlord licensing scheme. Almost £17million in savings have been identified through “efficiencies” in the delivery of services and nearly £5million through cutbacks to them.

The projected overspend of £24.6million in 2023/24 is almost entirely due to pressures on the council’s children’s services and temporary accommodation budgets. Housing services are expected to overspend by £12.9million due to the spiralling number of families in the borough needing expensive nightly paid temporary housing and the increasing cost of such accommodation.

Children’s services is forecast to overspend by £12.4m, mainly because of the amount spent on children’s social care (£10.2m). Staffing costs within children’s social care make up £3.5million of the overspend, primarily due to having to rely on agency staff to fill vacant posts. The council is set to try and recruit social workers from overseas in an attempt to reduce its reliance on agency workers.

Within children’s social care, the remaining overspend of £6.7million is due to the cost of care packages and placements. Small amounts of underspending in other areas such as residents’ services and finance and governance have reduced the total overspend accumulated by other departments in the council.

Duncan Whitfield, Lambeth’s interim corporate director of finance and governance, told a council scrutiny meeting on Wednesday that despite increasing costs from temporary housing and social care, there was no chance of the council going bankrupt in the near future.

He said most councils that had gone bust so far, such as Croydon and Thurrock, had done so as a result of “gimmick schemes”.

Mr Whitfield said the only such project he had found in Lambeth was the council’s house building company Homes for Lambeth [HfL]. Lambeth decided to bring the company back under direct control of the council last year after an independent report branded its attempts at building homes “very poor”.

But he added his prediction that it was only a matter of time before a well run council in London went bust.

Pictured top: Lambeth council’s town hall in Brixton (Picture: Robert Firth)