Warwickshire County Council: Councillors call for multi-million pound projects to be justified - but will they get their wish?

Councillors calling for the benefits of multi million pound projects to be measured have been warned that Warwickshire County Council will struggle to resource such work.The county’s resources and fire and rescue overview and scrutiny committee, a panel of councillors that runs the rule over the authority’s performance, this week considered a report on the processes around funding capital projects.It came forward partly as a result of councillors being concerned over projects coming back requiring much larger budgets or with later completion dates.

Liz Firmstone, the county’s head of finance, transformation and transactions, said those problems had been caused by an “increasingly challenging landscape” amid rising energy costs, inflation, higher borrowing costs and competition for access to workforces, a problem she said had been exacerbated locally by HS2.The Capital Financial Management Project brought in changes to reduce risk, improve governance around the council's decisions and improve processes.It includes a new operating model to help ensure new schemes "are clearly driven by council priorities”, plus a new fund to pay for up-front work to better estimate the cost of major projects.“One of the problems we found was that the costings when schemes go into the capital programme are (done) at a very early stage,” said Ms Firmstone.“Until they went into the programme, they didn’t have the money to carry out detailed design work to work out accurate costings.

"Now services can bid into that fund to get that up-front money so that by the time something is added to the programme, the costings should be much more accurate and reliable.”“There is also a new budget monitoring and forecasting system which “will be easier for people to use and give better information, insights and reporting” with more emphasis on recording how many projects go over budget or past anticipated timescales.She added: “Part of the project has been about culture change and making sure people have a really good understanding of how their own personal actions are impacting on the effectiveness of the delivery of our capital programme.”Councillor Tim Sinclair (Con, Stratford North) noted that performance measures “seem to me to be entirely oriented towards how well we have spent the money” rather than what the projects achieve.“Our job (on that) hasn’t finished, in my view,” he said.“We spent a lot of money, what we haven’t done is got people using an asset that the town very much needs.”However, Rob Powell, the county’s strategic director for resources, said: “I would ask councillors to think carefully about the resourcing position the council finds itself in, and what is deliverable and realistic.“I would ask for us to go away and consider options.

"Some of what you are asking for is for other OSCs (overview and scrutiny committees) to consider in terms of benefits, we have to be careful about creating new work streams and functions at a time when we don’t have resources to invest.“The points are absolutely fair but we have to be careful.”

Cllr Sinclair acknowledged Mr Powell’s position but argued that the work needed to be done.

“I don’t disagree,” he said.

“We don’t have to do a lot of schemes but the schemes worth tens of millions of pounds, I think the investment is worthwhile.“There has already been agreement with Communities OSC that this will be done, it now needs to be done.

"Whether that is through this OSC or another, I think it is critically important that resources are put into ensuring the multiple millions of pounds that we spend actually achieves something.”