At Monday’s public consultation meeting (catch up with our live report), Isle of Wight council CEO, John Metcalfe sought to dispell rumours around the £46m reserves held by the council.
Although at the meeting he wasn’t able to give a detailed breakdown of the items within the £46m reserves, Mr Metcalfe did explain that around £35m of that money was already committed elsewhere, for items such as the highways PFI and redundancy payments.
Earmarked funds
The council have now provided a detailed breakdown of the reserves – in a more readable version than that published in the December 2015 Executive papers.
Items include:
- Money set aside for the integration of health and social care services under the My Life A Full Life programme;
- Mitigation against the increased risk and volatility arising from the introduction of the business rates;
- Reserves to fund the cost of redundancy in schools;
- Money from the government for the PFI contract;
- The new waste contract procurement costs and more.
What can be used?
Once all those earmarked costs are removed, the council are left with around £10m.
As part of their 2016/17 budget proposals, the Island Independents say they plan to take at least £4m from the reserves to help meet the budget gap created by the lower funding settlement from the Government.
It was explained at the meeting on Monday that the council need to retain around £5m in the reserves to cover any unforeseen emergencies.
The breakdown
A breakdown of the monies can be found in the document below. Click on the full screen icon to see larger version.
Image: P Schadlerunder CC BY 2.0
