Feverish festive season as budget takes shape

While a lot of people are thinking about unwinding for the festive season, this is a time of feverish activity at County Buildings.

Our minds are very firmly focussed on delivering our annual budget, which needs to go before the County Council in February.

It is always difficult trying to juggle conflicting priorities with a finite amount to spend, but that is the challenge, and believe me, it's a challenge we are rising to.

There has been a very good budget consultation programme drawn up this year, and the results of the public element of that are already being fed into the work of drawing up our future spending plans. Other consultation exercises are taking place with trade unions, business and our own members.

Prioritising our future spending plans is an enormously complex process. The big figures (very roughly rounded) are that we have £1 billion to provide services to nearly one million people, and we employ 30,000 staff to get the job done.

We have round-after-round of meetings scheduled in the coming weeks in order to ensure we make the right decisions. It's going to be a very interesting festive season.

Page Last Modified: 04/12/2007 11:23:09

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