Mid Sussex District Council reports underspend on its 2025/26 budget

The figures for up to the end of December were approved during a meeting of the cabinet on Monday (March 16).

Despite the over all underspend, some services have shown a deficit.

There has been a £76,000 overspend in waste services, which is largely down to subscription debt for the Green Waste Service. Measures are being taken to recover the outstanding money.

Building control has forecast an overspend of £35,000, due to a reduction in demand and a shortfall in income.

A £135,000 underspend on housing options has been forecast, with a further £265,000 placed in reserves to increase the funding available for the purchase and maintenance of temporary accommodation.

As for the Capital Programme – one off projects rather than the day-to-day running of council services – the planned spend for 2025/26 is £16.1m.

Reflecting on the council’s financial position, leader Robert Eggleston looked at world events and how they had impacted things on a local level.

Describing ‘an extraordinary decade’, he added: “It’s nearly the ten-year anniversary of Brexit, we went through Covid in 2020, we’re on our second Trump presidency with all of the uncertainties that that has created internationally and for the world economy.

“Then you layer on top of that the government’s – and the previous government’s – approach to the funding of local government, the new burdens we take on without the resources to manage it, and things like local government reorganisation, which puts an enormous strain on organisations like us.”

Mr Eggleston said it was down to the council’s ‘organisational resillience’ that the changes had been managed as well as they had, and that the authority had been resourced in a ‘prudent and robust’ way.

But he warned that things would not get any easier in the foreseeable future.

The council will cease to exist in 2028, becoming part of a unitary authority. Figures in the Medium-Term Financial Strategy predict a £1.469m budget gap in 2027/28 with that gap widening to just shy of £6m by 2029/20 – quite a hole to plug for whoever is in charge by then.

As well as approving the budget management report, the cabinet also agreed that around £500,000 could be spent improving cyber resilience and security by migrating the council’s regulatory services software suite from on‑premise servers to a centrally hosted infrastructure.

A further £500,000 was approved for the re-procurement and contract of the Human Resources Information System, ensuring that staff are paid correctly and information held about staff and councillors is in line with GDPR.

Both of these projects can be covered by the annual service budget provided within the Medium-Term Financial Plan.