Agenda item - Chair's Communications

3.1 The Chair gave the following communication:

Today we are here as a joint meeting of both the Place and People Overview & Scrutiny Committees as part of the budget scrutiny process. We are joined by Cllr Jacob Taylor, Deputy Leader of the Council and cabinet member for Finance & City Regeneration, and Nigel Manvell, the council’s Chief Financial Officer, who will be talking to us about the budget and then taking questions from members. I will note that we have the Leader of the Council, Bella Sankey here. 

Both Cllr Jacob Taylor and Nigel Manvell will explain more shortly but at the moment we are still awaiting more details from the government to inform the budget setting process, so the report is high level budget thinking and the legal and financial background to the budget. You may have noted from the papers that we don’t actually know what the financial settlement is until the 19^th December, which is the day of Full Council.  

The minutes of this meeting and any specific comments made by committee members will be shared with the Cabinet to inform their planning, which is exactly what the purpose of this committee. 

We will look in depth at the details of the budget plans in our scheduled Place and People meetings in January, by which time there will be the detailed information available about the financial settlement.  

Although we only have one item on the agenda, there are a lot of us here this afternoon and so we will have a lot of questions to get through. Can I therefore please request that both those asking and answering questions are as brief and to the point as possible, so succinct, please everybody. We want everyone who wishes to contribute to have the opportunity.