{"id":499165,"date":"2025-10-14T16:02:22","date_gmt":"2025-10-14T16:02:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/499165\/"},"modified":"2025-10-14T16:02:22","modified_gmt":"2025-10-14T16:02:22","slug":"bristol-city-council-faces-117m-deficit-in-five-years","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/499165\/","title":{"rendered":"Bristol City Council faces \u00a3117m deficit in five years"},"content":{"rendered":"

The authority has to plug the huge funding gap\"ManCllr Patrick McAllister at Bristol City Council strategy and resources committee on Monday, October 13, 2025(Image: Bristol City Council\/YouTube)<\/p>\n

Bristol City Council faces a mammoth \u00a3117million budget shortfall<\/a> in five years\u2019 time. And the funding gap for the upcoming 2026\/27 financial year beginning in April stands at \u00a320.8million.<\/p>\n

The figures, which are outlined in the authority\u2019s rolling five-year financial forecast called the medium-term financial strategy, were revealed to councillors at the strategy and resources committee.<\/p>\n

They represent the expected shortfalls<\/a> before the council considers new savings and income plans \u2013 which it must do to set a balanced budget as required by law \u2013 and is the difference between the money it expects to raise and what it will need to spend to continue current service levels.<\/p>\n

Cllr Patrick McAllister (Green, Hotwells & Harbourside) told the meeting that the organisation\u2019s ability to make sound financial plans was ‘held hostage to the central government\u2019s timetable’.<\/p>\n

A report to the committee said: \u201cThis MTFS identifies a cumulative peak funding gap of \u00a3117.1million by the final year of the 2026\/27 \u2013 2030\/31 period, with a funding gap of \u00a320.8million in 2026\/27.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis gap will need to be closed via a range of short- and medium-term interventions and will require budget reductions, income maximisation, transformation and savings to be delivered to ensure a balanced budget for both the coming financial year 2026\/27 and for the medium term.\u201d<\/p>\n

In a statement ahead of the meeting, the city council said: \u201cWe already have actions in place to manage this pressure.<\/p>\n

\u201cMost of these actions are contained within major transformation programmes across adults and children\u2019s social care, education and homelessness services.<\/p>\n

\u201cThese actions include reviewing how much we pay for goods and services, establishing new contracts and ways of buying essentials such as temporary accommodation.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe aim being to make the council a smaller, more efficient organisation whilst providing the services people need in these areas. We\u2019re reducing the amount of property we manage in order to cut costs.\u201d<\/p>\n

Finance director Andy Rothery told the committee: \u201cHigh inflation is impacting on our payments to providers, and we are seeing ongoing pressures on adult social care, children\u2019s social care and temporary accommodation.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis involves the council thinking more significantly about how transformation programmes address those budget gaps because it\u2019s an ongoing challenge.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve based our estimates on the changes we may see from 2026\/27 from the government\u2019s fair funding review.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe will know more details and how this impacts our budget following the chancellor\u2019s autumn statement which we expect on November 26, and we are expecting the detail in the week commencing December 15.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe resulting impact for new savings and income plans on our budget is a gap of \u00a320.8million from next year, and over the five-year life of the plan this goes up to \u00a3117million.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is without mitigations, without new income and savings plans going in.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s important to note that the financial strategy is a position statement and not the plan that proposes a balanced budget.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe will be starting a consultation shortly on new savings plans.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe will be finalising our plans to balance the budget over the next couple of months.\u201d<\/p>\n

Cllr McAllister said: \u201cThere\u2019s a general theme throughout this that there seems to be frustration that we have so little control both of our own budgets and the information and timescale by which we get the information about what our budgets will look like in the future.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a sector-wide issue, but with the (chancellor\u2019s) Budget being put back until November we have much less time to make accurate forecasts for our financial planning.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s hard to make good financial plans.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe don\u2019t know exactly how much money we need to make from savings.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur ability to make sound financial plans is held hostage to the central government\u2019s timetable and we really need to see reform of those processes that govern local government finances.\u201d<\/p>\n

Council leader and committee chairman Cllr Tony Dyer (Green, Southville) said: \u201cAlthough I\u2019m generally in agreement, that\u2019s not anything new \u2013 local authorities have had that before.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat will hopefully be different this time is that the government is intending to give us a three-year settlement, which hopefully means we can plan better going forward because we should have the information we need up front.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis move to having a three-year mutli-year settlement will hopefully give us the room to plan ahead more securely.\u201d<\/p>\n

The council will soon launch public consultation on proposals to cut costs and increase income to close the financial gap from 2026\/27 as the process of setting next year\u2019s budget begins.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The authority has to plug the huge funding gapCllr Patrick McAllister at Bristol City Council strategy and resources…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":499166,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8818],"tags":[381,3893,748,393,4884,800,33622,285,10750,31692,16,15,961],"class_list":{"0":"post-499165","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-bristol","8":"tag-bristol","9":"tag-bristol-city-council","10":"tag-britain","11":"tag-england","12":"tag-great-britain","13":"tag-harbourside","14":"tag-hotwells","15":"tag-politics","16":"tag-southville","17":"tag-the-budget","18":"tag-uk","19":"tag-united-kingdom","20":"tag-your-money"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115373366014399069","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/499165","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=499165"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/499165\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/499166"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=499165"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=499165"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=499165"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}