Strategick Countcil Plan for Nottingham City Countcil for 2024-27

Welcome to the refresh of the Strategic Council Plan for Nottingham City Council for 2024-27. This document clearly sets out what we aim to deliver for our residents, visitors and partners by 2027.

Foreword

Nottingham City Council serves a diverse city, and we believe in the values of equality, fairness and inclusivity. 

Nottingham City Council faces a very serious financial challenge over the coming years, and unprecedented changes to the context in which we operate. 

Nonetheless, we remain ambitious and will continue to strive to deliver for the city and people of Nottingham. We will continue to seek every opportunity for increased funding and improve our partnerships with key organisations, including the soon-to-be-established East Midlands Combined County Authority which we have created with our partner councils. We will do more to facilitate conversations, broker agreements and convene partners and stakeholders in the wider interests of the city. We celebrate our diversity. Our commitment to Nottingham and local people is undimmed. We have not stopped focussing on the needs of residents and the City.

The reopened Nottingham Castle represents our commitment to maintain Nottingham as a prime visitor destination and the opening of the brand-new Central Library as part of the Broad Marsh Car Park and Bus Station complex, puts children, young people and learning at the heart of its design. We continue to strive towards achieving as many of our carbon neutral ambitions as possible building on our work on zero emission buses, promoting public transport and active travel, such as cycle lanes, energy efficient homes and creating and maintaining green spaces around the city. Elections will take place in May 2024 to the new post of Mayor for the East Midlands Combined County Authority. With Nottingham City a constituent member, residents stand to benefit from the city’s share of at least £38 million investment funding per year over 30 years, as well as a brand-new City Region Sustainable Transport Settlement of over £1.5 billion.

As a council we have also made some significant improvements in the last three years supported by our Improvement and Assurance Board. Nevertheless, as a result of exceptional financial challenges, we issued a Section 114 notice in November 2023, indicating that we could not deliver a balanced budget for the year 2023/4.

In response, significant savings have been incorporated for 2024/25 and these savings, based on delivering statutory minimum service standards, are reflected in this plan and will alter what we can deliver. We face some very difficult decisions which we must make to get our finances onto a stable and sustainable footing. We must change how we work; reshaping or reducing the services we provide so that the Council is financially sustainable in the long-term. Over the next few years, these decisions will create a very different Council. In due course this plan will be subject to further review and change to reflect the significant anticipated budget gap over the period of the plan which will require additional savings to be found so that our priority actions remain aligned with the resources that we have available.

It is important to note some of the challenges Nottingham and the City Council have faced. We continue to feel the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, cost of living crisis, and significant funding reductions from central Government. At the same time, the need for our demand-led services including adult social care and children’s services has never been higher, while our financial resilience has been reduced through correcting the mistakes we have made in the past.

In February 2024, the Government announced that the Secretary of State would appoint Commissioners to Nottingham City Council for two years. Statutory Intervention through Commissioners is a very significant step to take and this Strategic Council Plan may need to take account of, or even be superseded by a revised Nottingham City Council Improvement Plan, required of the Council within the first three months of the intervention.

We will continue to place people at the centre of what we do, but it is clear to us that the way in which we do it must change. We will reshape the organisation and redesign how we deliver our services, ensuring that our statutory duties are met while finding a more efficient way to deliver for our People, our Neighbourhoods and our City. Our current financial situation means that we have to prioritise the statutory services that keep people safe while we seek exceptional financial support from the Government to bridge our funding gap.

It is clear that we need to increase the pace of our transformation and improvement journey. We have learned much in recent years which we can apply to this new challenge. The ways in which we work have changed since the adoption of our new constitution in 2021. We have strengthened and revised the way we ensure fiscal sustainability to better manage the Council’s money, and this is supported by a new Budget Review and Oversight Group made up of senior councillors, our Chief Financial Officer and Corporate Directors reviewing issues and pressures each month.

This four-year plan is both aligned with and deliverable within the context of our rolling four-year budget plan, our statutory duties, and grant funding that covers particular programmes and projects within the period of 2023 to 2027, noting that further review and change will be required to account for the budget gaps in 2025/26 and beyond. This plan sets out how we will use our resources and it has been revised following the May 2023 elections, the issuance of a Section 114 Notice by our Chief Financial Officer (Section 151 Officer) and the agreement of significant budget cuts as part of the 2024/25 Medium-Term Financial Plan. We are committed to reviewing this plan regularly and reporting on our progress.

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