Agenda item

Report of the Chamberlain.

The Committee received a report of the Chamberlain which provided updates regarding the top risks within the Departmental Risk Register.

The Chairman emphasised that Members should be in no doubt about the level of seriousness that the Corporation was taking about the Police budget, no other issue is commanding more time than ensuring the budget is brought back onto a sustainable footing. Whilst pointing out that pay, pensions and overtime continued to bear down on funds, he sympathised with Members concerns and reiterated that, thanks to a draw-down of reserves, the budget was only nominally balanced; this, clearly, was unsustainable in the longer run.

The Chairman asked Members to discuss Action Know Fraud in the non-public section of the meeting due to the commercial sensitivities with the project.

The Chamberlain added that recent post-Brexit income projections for the Corporation’s property portfolio remain robust. The City Surveyor added that, more widely, there was reasonable confidence that the office market would hold up, he added that the pipeline for new and refurbished offices was, in the short-to-medium term, “fairly low”, so the expectation was that rental income would remain healthy. The Chairman added that as negotiations play out, business faced a degree of uncertainty in the short term, however, he was confident that UK fundamentals remained robust. The Deputy Chamberlain responded that, in the event of a downturn, revenue would remain, at least in the medium term, stable as tenants had signed multi-year rental agreements; less stable, in a downturn scenario, would be the values of the assets – this would be particularly significant to the Corporation if the loans for the major projects became more onerous, as its ability to service the debt by raising cash though selling assets could be hampered.      

RESOLVED – That the Committee notes the report.