BUDGET reductions, redundancies, internal restructuring and service reform resulted in Worcester City Council ending last financial year with a £1.7 million surplus.

At a time when the majority of councils up and down the country are struggling to balance the books, the city council has a big pot of cash to play with; and Fort Royal Park looks set to be one of the main beneficiaries.

The council is now consulting the public about how it should spend its budget and their responses will go some way to deciding how about £690,000 of the one-off lump sum should be spent – but it seems the park will be invested in regardless of what people say.

At a meeting of the performance management and budget scrutiny committee, opposition Labour councillor Joy Squires asked whether the council would abandon the project if the public did not express a desire for money to be spent there, despite it being an election pledge by Coun Jabba Riaz who represents the hotly contested Cathedral ward for the Tories.

In reply, Coun Simon Geraghty said: “We have to listen to the public but sometimes we have to make political decisions.”

Of the £1.7 million, £118,000 has been transfered to the general reserves fund, £144,000 put towards pension provision, and £8,000 spent on fitting refuse vehicles with tracking devices to make sure they work efficiently.

That leaves £1.5 million for the council to spend how it wishes, but contained in papers that went before the committee on Wednesday night were indications that some of the £690,000 “priority investments” pot could go on regenerating the market area in Angel Place while improvements to the northern section of the riverside are also planned.

There are indications that £410,000 will be set aside to cover the cost of redundancies in the second phase of restructuring, kickstarting spend to save projects and training.

The remaining £450,000 looks set to go towards covering the cost of changes to the Cattlemarket car park and investment in Worcester Crematorium.

The reason why the council had such a large surplus at the end of the last financial year in March was because it had a windfall £570,000 VAT rebate, which dated back to the 1990s.

The revenue and benefits service also performed better than expected – to the tune of about £300,000 – while efficiency savings, including about £260,000 on staffing costs, also contributed.

Finance chiefs are insisting that the council still has a long way to go to meet the Government’s demand to cut its budget by about 28.5 per cent over the coming years, but believe they are in a strong position to do that.