Denbighshire’s cabinet were warned that the council’s services are currently facing a £2.8 million budget overspend.

Speaking at a Denbighshire cabinet meeting this week, head of finance Liz Thomas gave the cabinet their monthly finance report updated up to the end of October.

The report included a summary of the council’s revenue budget for 2024/25.

Whilst Ms Thomas said some services had underspent, she explained the savings had been offset by overspending in other areas.

She said: “Services, as a whole, continue to overspend, and that overspend is £2.8m. There are no significant changes to those services for this month.

“The areas of overspend are in education and children’s (services), highways and environmental services, and then to a lesser extent in planning and public protection and countryside services and housing and communities, as a result of smaller levels of forecast unachieved savings.”

She went on to explain there was an underspend in adult social care and homelessness of just over £500,000.

But while there had been an increase in the level of underspend in homelessness, moving from £1m to £1.3m, due to an underspend in temporary accommodation, this had been offset by an increase in adult social care costs.

This cost rose from around £500,000 to just under £800,000, due to the demands of services dealing with adult social care, mental health, older people, complex disabilities, and community living budgets.

Ms Thomas explained the risk of overspend was difficult to manage in these areas because it was “demand-led”.

She added: “So things like children’s services, Denbighshire has a small number of children in residential placements, but were we to see an increase in those residential placements, the cost associated with those individual placements have a significant risk, and despite all the management we can put in place, that is a demand-led statutory service that we have to provide.”

But cabinet member for finance Cllr Gwyneth Ellis claimed the council’s finances were ‘well managed’.

“What’s key here is that this council has been really well financially managed over a number of years – and I can’t take credit for that and even Liz (head of finance) can’t take credit for that, but Liz has continued that, which is to her credit – and how important good reserve management is in these sort of situations ,” she said.

“The fact that we’ve still got reasonably healthy reserves means that we are able to be relatively comfortable in the way we can deal with risks.”

Members noted the budgets set for 2024/25 and progress against the agreed strategy.