Senior officers at Cornwall Council have expressed their concerns about the authority’s latest budget plans.

The council is currently scrutinising the budget for the next financial year which will see council tax rise by 2.99% and hundreds of jobs being cut to save money.

This week the council’s overview and scrutiny committees have started to look at the budget plans in detail and provide feedback to the leading Cabinet.

First up was the economic growth and development overview and scrutiny committee and councillors were concerned about the level of cuts being proposed and the state of the council’s reserves.

Tracie Langley, the council’s chief financial officer, outlined the budget plans and said that the council’s savings programme for the coming year would be almost £65million.

She said: “The savings programme that we need to implement is larger than any we have ever seen before. It will be around £65m to £70m.”

On reserves she commented: “That is my one worry, that we have been whittling down our reserves every year, that is one thing I am trying to reverse.”

Ms Langley explained that her “one red line” in budget planning was to make sure that there were sufficient general reserves available for unexpected expenditure. She explained that this could mean covering costs for something like the covid-19 pandemic.

However in recent years the council has been overspending on providing general services which has meant using reserves to cover those additional costs. This is particularly the case in adult social care where rising demand has led to increased costs.

Explaining the reserves situation further she said: “We keep overspending on the money that we have to run day to day operations that is why we have to reduce the amount that our operations cost so that we can afford that so we can get back to some balance on our reserves.”

Councillors also asked about government announcements that local government would be getting more money this year and whether that would help the council’s budget.

Ms Langley said that one of the key issues was that the way the government allocates funding is complex and is not entirely clear. And she said that there was a need for the government to provide more long term funding to help with budget setting and financial plans.

She added: “This year, more than ever, the one thing we want as finance people is certainty. We want three-year settlements so that we can have certainty in our planning. This year we have got lots of one off amounts of grant and we can’t plan with one off amounts of grant.

“We are still waiting for the fairer funding review, the business rates review and the impact of adult social care review all of which we were supposed to have over the last three years and haven’t so we are still waiting. Until it is funded appropriately it is difficult to set it out.”

Phil Mason, strategic director for economic growth and development, said that his department would be cutting jobs but said that most of this would be done through not filling vacant posts, voluntary redundancy or redeployment.

However he said that a planned change to the senior structure was likely to result in some compulsory redundancies.

Mr Mason said that a lot of the cuts in the department would be made by altering services – one key area is to reduce the number of road inspections from three times a year to two.

He said that this would only return the service to how it operated previously and said that it was hoped that reports of road issues and maintenance requirements could also be made by other council staff and staff from the council owned Corserv group.

One area he was concerned about was the planning department – he explained that it had been expected that the number of planning applications would fall during the pandemic.

“Through covid the service thought there would be a contracting economy and we would get less through the doors, but the opposite has happened. We are one of all local authorities whose workload has increased absolutely and doesn’t have the budget in place to recruit the staff that we need.”

Mr Mason warned that the service was at a point where it was on a knife edge between coping and not coping.

The committee agreed to recommend the draft budget plans to the Cabinet for approval.

All scrutiny committees will continue to debate the budget plans which are also currently subject to public consultation.

Reports will then come back to the Cabinet with any feedback and recommendations to inform its final decision on the budget plans which will be taken to full council for a vote next month.