Town hall’s £5.5m homeless overspend
MANCHESTER town hall is facing a £5.5m overspend due to soaring numbers of homeless people and vulnerable children going into care.
At their latest executive meeting council bosses admitted huge pressures on social services have left them facing a shortfall at the end of the financial year.
Nearly £2m of that is due to government funding failing to keep pace with Manchester’s spiralling homelessness problem, according to an interim budget report by the city treasurer.
Changes to the way Whitehall funds temporary homelessness accommodation, brought in earlier this year, have not reflected ‘the significant increase which Manchester has seen in the numbers of those presenting as homeless,’ it says.
Meanwhile, the town hall has not managed to cut the number of vulnerable children coming into the care system at the pace it had planned. In total children’s services faces an overspend of more than £7m as a result, although that is partly off-set by underspends in other departments.
It had originally aimed to place no more than 48 children in residential care – which is particularly expensive – at any given point but the number currently stands at 63, despite ongoing work to reduce pressure on the service in the wake of a damning 2014 Ofsted report.
The council is also spending £1.6m more than expected on providing housing to teenagers when they leave care, as it tries to avoid placing them in emergency bed and breakfast accommodation.
Both children’s services and adults’ services have introduced new budget plans aimed at fixing the shortfall, which will ‘continue to seek opportunities to safely mitigate spend pressures,’ including changes to the way the council commissions care placements.
Manchester council has seen one of the most dramatic budget reductions in the country since government funding cuts began in 2011.
Labour councillor John Flanagan, the town hall’s finance chief, blamed the council’s forecast overspend squarely on ministers.
“The city council is supporting those areas that need support whereas the government, not just in this city but across the country, has underspent or underfunded children’s services and adults’ services,” he said.