Urgent repairs busting roads budget by £1.4m

The cost of repairing roads in Calderdale which are most in need of attention is expected to be £1.4m over budget this year, councillors have been told.

The council was projecting a £5.4m deficit on its £249.8m budget for 2025-26, but that is now expected to reach £7.2m by the end of the financial year.

Deficits have to be covered by the council's financial reserves, which senior councillors were warned were limited.

A meeting of the authority's cabinet heard the financial position had worsened as demand to care for its vulnerable people and fix its roads had increased.

Senior councillors heard savings the authority has been making through the year have seen good progress, but they are still being out-stripped by demand for some services the council has to provide.

According to the Local Democracy Reporting Service, cabinet member for resources, councillor Silvia Dacre said: "This is not perhaps the news we'd hoped for.

"This has primarily been as a result of considerable difficulty in controlling spend in some of our demand-led services such as adults and children's services and also highways repairs."

Dacre said the overall figure masked good progress in reducing overspends but the warning was there that if the council cannot entirely reduce the deficit by the financial years' end, then further reserves would have to be used.

When preparing the 2026-27 budget - which councillors approved in February - baseline budgets for each directorate were set in such a way as to avoid this year's level of overspending in the year ahead, said Dacre.

Adult services are £5.7m over budget, and both public services and children's services are around £1.8m over budget, the councillors were told.

Roads now come under the regeneration and strategy directorate, which has a £396,000 overspend, having transferred from public services to enable better work planning and value for money, with the highway maintenance overspend itself coming to £1.4m.

Underspends elsewhere in the directorate's budget are offsetting that figure, the meeting heard.

Deputy Leader of the Council, councillor Scott Patient, said many of the pressure points were not unique to Calderdale and planning for the coming year's budget showed the council was trying to be proactive rather than reactive.

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