County Durham chiefs may launch emergency overhaul of spending due to crisis

Budgets approved early this year by the government and councils across the country were almost immediately thrown into disarray by the COVID-19 outbreak.

And now, with the UK beginning to ease lockdown restrictions, finance chiefs are beginning to consider how to make their books balance once more.

“We normally set our budget in February and we would normally look at it again in the last quarter [of the financial year],” said Durham County Council’s Conservative opposition leader Coun Richard Bell.

“It seems likely there will be an emergency national budget and that we will also need something similar.

“How does the council plan to react to financial turbulence in the coming months?”

Coun Bell was speaking at a meeting of the county council’s Corporate Overview and Scrutiny Management Board.

The latest estimates have suggested the financial hit to County Durham could be worth about £50million by March 2021.

Government grants to soften the blow are currently worth £33million to the county, leaving a shortfall of £17million.

John Hewitt, the council’s corporate director of Resources, said: “[An emergency budget] will be dependent on exactly what and when the government makes its own announcements on any budget amendments.

“I would suggest that will probably be in August.

“We will be doing out Q1 monitoring at the end of this month, feeding that back through to cabinet and scrutiny panels, in terms of what the overall financial picture lookups like for the council.”

A message from the Editor:

Thank you for reading this story on our website. While I have your attention, I also have an important request to make of you.

In order for us to continue to provide high quality and trusted local news on this free-to-read site, I am asking you to also please purchase a copy of our newspaper.

Our journalists are highly trained and our content is independently regulated by IPSO to some of the most rigorous standards in the world. But being your eyes and ears comes at a price. So we need your support more than ever to buy our newspapers during this crisis.

With the coronavirus lockdown having a major impact on many of our local valued advertisers - and consequently the advertising that we receive - we are more reliant than ever on you helping us to provide you with news and information by buying a copy of our newspaper.