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Agenda and minutes

Venue: Council Chamber, County Hall, The Rhadyr USK. View directions

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Items
No. Item

1.

Apologies for Absence

Minutes:

Tony Kear, Phil Murphy as substitute. Councillor Murphy was elected as vice-chair for the meeting, nominated by Councillor Chandler and seconded by Councillor Bond.

 

2.

Declarations of Interest

Minutes:

Councillor Strong declared a non-prejudicial interest as Chair of The Friends Of Caldicot Library, and  Secretary of the Gwent County History Association.

3.

Public Open Forum

Minutes:

No submissions were received.

 

4.

Budget Scrutiny: Scrutiny of the Budget proposals for 2023/24 pdf icon PDF 7 MB

Please use this link to access the papers for this item - available as part of the 18th January 2023 Cabinet agenda.

 

20230118 Cabinet - Draft 2023-24 Revenue Capital Budget for consultation - Covering report Final v2.pdf (monmouthshire.gov.uk)

Minutes:

Cabinet Member Rachel Garrick delivered the presentation and answered the members’ questions with Peter Davies, Jonathan Davies, Jane Rodgers, Nikki Wellington, Matt Phillips, Cabinet Member Sara Burch and Cabinet Member Paul Griffiths.

 

Challenge:

 

There are concerns about levels of confidence in delivering the proposed savings, the risks involved, and the cross-collateral impacts e.g. in SCH5, reducing staff in Adult Social Care, what impact might that have on SCH6, with an increase in staff? There isn’t a sense of how the two go together? What is the ability to deliver the redesigns in SCH5, when there is no head of Adult Social Services in post?

 

There is no denying that there are significant challenges in the mandates put forward for adult social care. We spent a lot of time thinking of the best way to generate savings without creating undue risk for individuals. Following the pandemic response, we are now at the point of regrouping and getting back to strategic priorities, particularly early help and prevention, ablement and reablement, and partnership working. We must get back to supporting practice to enable people to live as independently as possible with minimum reliance on expensive packages of care, and ensuring that every penny is spent in the most cost-effective way by expanding the type of care provision. We need to review and assess people already receiving care, and those due to come in. We won’t compromise on safeguarding but we will challenge ourselves as to whether we are enabling that person to the best effect, so that we can reduce some of the care costs. It will be important to join up with health partners and use all of our collective resources. We will look to support people to avoid going into hospital or to get out quickly, and continue with innovation – we have many ideas.

 

Regarding an increase of £1.4m in fees and charges in the summary paper, there is no breakdown of where this will come from?

 

Within the budget papers, there is a detailed breakdown of the fees and charges, split out first by Directorate and then by the services for which we are charging. Within the Social Care mandates there is a separate mandate for social care charging that goes into detail. the main bloc of information is in Appendix 1, with links through to the full schedule of fees and charges totalling the increase of £1.4m.

 

The £1.4m social care increase doesn’t have a further breakdown in the top-level paper.

 

We tried to make the paper more concise but we can definitely take that feedback.

 

Residents are already raising concerns about savings coming from service delivery. What is the explanation and justification to residents that few savings are proposed in other areas?

 

Much of this is due to the number of savings previously delivered in those areas, leaving many at a base level already, and risks about what is needed: the more people are pared back, the harder it will be to deliver an adequate and competent  ...  view the full minutes text for item 4.

5.

Next Meeting

Minutes:

This meeting has changed to Monday 27th February 2023 at 10:00am.