Plymouth City Council balanced its 2024/25 budget while protecting local services and investing in ambitious regeneration plans for the city despite facing significant cost and demand pressures, a report to Cabinet says.
The provisional 2024/25 revenue and capital outturn report says that like other authorities the Council has faced significant challenges beyond its control, including inflationary increases in all services areas and growing cost and demand pressures in as children’s and adult social care, SEND provision and homelessness services, necessitating departments to deliver savings plans and maintain tight management of staffing costs.
Despite these challenges the £241.6 million revenue budget that supported the delivery of more than 300 Council services was balanced at year end, while a £109.3 million capital programme – a £17.9 million increase on the previous year – helped draw in millions of pounds of investment into the city’s infrastructure and regeneration by levering in Government grants, developer contributions and borrowing.
This invested in infrastructure schemes such as:
- The Woolwell to the George improvement scheme, which will help ease congestion in the north of the city
- The Derriford District Centre scheme, which has delivered a new retail centre providing popular stores and leisure facilities, while supporting local jobs.
- The new Foulston Park, which is seeing the former Brickfields site being transformed into a centre for sporting excellence and community wellbeing
- The city centre regeneration, including Old Town Street and New George Street improvements, Armada Way regeneration scheme and the Civic Square improvement scheme, helping inspire investor confidence in the city
- Plymouth South National Marine Park, which is seeing the transformation of waterfront landmarks such as Tinside Lido with the support of lottery funding.
Councillor Mark Lowry, Cabinet member for Finance, said: “It’s no mean feat to balance the books at year end when you face the scale of challenges that we have over the last year. The amount of hard work behind these figures shouldn’t be underestimated.
“Despite these challenges we have remained committed to avoiding reductions to services and continuing to deliver the priorities and ambitions for Plymouth, with multiple schemes that result in tangible improvements for city residents.
“While we did use our ‘usable reserves’ to offset some of the pressures that arose during the financial year, this was a considered and sensible approach that helped avoid cuts to valued services and to protect the elderly and vulnerable in the city. We have already made a commitment in our medium-term financial plan to rebuild the level of reserves in future budgets.
“While this financial year promises to be no less challenging than the last, given the systemic issues with demand and cost pressures we are facing in social care services, I am confident that this Government understands the problems that councils are facing and will start to provide more support for addressing them than we have been used to in previous years.”