Northamptonshire County Council set to balance books for second year running

Cllr Longley is confident the books will balance this year.

With one month to go until the financial year end, Northamptonshire County Council is set to balance its books.

The latest financial update given to the council’s cabinet on Tuesday (March 10) says that the authority is currently looking at a £119,000 underspend on its £417.7m annual budget.

Finance portfolio holder Cllr Malcolm Longley, who has been cautious for many months about the finances, was more upbeat than usual when delivering the out turn report for month ten of the financial year.

Corby Technical School will get a 1.2m extension to help cover a shortage of school places in the town.

He said: “We are on track to slightly better than balance the books and we do know that period 11 is looking pretty good as well. We are now pretty much at the end of the financial year, so I would not expect that to change very much, it will get a little bit better so I think we can say with some confidence that we will balance the books this year.”

This will be the second year in a row the authority has stayed in the black, after it financially imploded in 2018 and posted a £40m deficit after raiding its reserves for several years and failing to properly monitor its service costs.

The authority, which is led by a different leadership team that preceded over its collapse, has got itself out of the financial hole by using a variety of methods including using funds from the sale of its One Angel Square headquarters, not replacing staff in departments, freezing employee pay, overhauling the finances of some under-performing services and investing in ways to transform services. There have also had to be mitigation measures put in place to account for a £7.6m overspend in its failing children’s services department, which later this year will transfer over to an independent trust.

At the cabinet meeting yesterday Liberal Democrat Chris Stanbra questioned why the authority – which is handing over 22 of its 36 of its libraries to community groups to save costs – had underspent by £50,000 on new books. He was told he would receive a written response to the question.

Also at the meeting the council agreed to spend £1.2m on an extension to Corby Technical School to cope with a school places shortage and another £700,000 at Corby special school Red Kite Academy to create a sixth form.