7:59am Friday 27th June 2008
By Jack Blanchard
A COMPUTER bug is being blamed for Worcester City Council overspending its budget by more than £200,000 last year.
Tory cabinet member for finance Roger Knight said the council had been on track to meet its spending plan with only a few weeks of the last financial year to go – only to find a glitch in a piece of computer software was masking the fact the city had actually overspent by £204,000.
The city has now had to plug the gap from its dwindling cash reserves, but insists it will be able to recover the money over the course of the coming year with “no impact to council taxpayers”.
Presenting the council’s end-of-year accounts to the audit committee, Coun Knight said he was “extremely disappointed” to be reporting a £204,000 overspend from the council’s £54 million budget.
“Some weeks back we were looking at a break-even figure for the year,” he said.
“But then a new version of this particular piece of software came out and one cell, which had been showing a surplus of £200,000, was suddenly reduced to zero.”
He blamed a piece of software called Academy, which some councils use to manage benefit accounts.
“It’s very disappointing, but there’s nothing we can do about it,” he said.
“This happened to all local authorities to a lesser or greater extent who use the Academy software.”
Coun Knight said that earlier in the year the council had been on course for a far greater overspend, but that emergency cutbacks which were made in January had been effective in reducing the deficit.
“If we hadn’t successfully embarked on a round of savings then, this would have been an overspend of £400,000,” he said.
He said three key areas were to blame for the council’s financial woes during the previous year.
l The council failed to save anywhere near as much money as it had forecast by being more efficient. Cost – £223,000 l The actual cost of offering elderly people free bus travel was not fully met by the Government, leaving the city to pick up the extra bill. Cost – £182,000.
l The amount people are spending in city car parks is falling, meaning the council overestimated how much cash they would bring in. Cost –£166,000.
However, the cutbacks elsewhere meant the final net overspend was £204,000, he said.
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