THE CUPBOARD IS STILL FULL — AND ONE OF THE BILLS NOW SAYS £40.7 MILLION
Sandwell Budget & Corporate Scrutiny – the September papers deserve rather more than a quick flick through
LONG READ WARNING: This is another one of those blogs where the phrase “just a quick look at the council papers” has gone horribly wrong.
The agenda pack runs to 234 pages.
So put the kettle on, locate the biscuits and perhaps tell somebody where you've gone. If you get lost somewhere between the Dedicated Schools Grant and the Housing Revenue Account, send up a flare.
Because buried inside this month's Sandwell Budget and Corporate Scrutiny papers are some figures that deserve considerably more attention than they are likely to receive on Facebook.
The Board meets on Thursday 10 September 2026 at 6pm.
There are four substantive items: the Council's Quarter 4/Annual Corporate Performance Report, the first budget monitoring report for 2026/27, the annual scrutiny report, and the Board's new work programme.
And before we go any further, one important point.
Labour's legacy. Reform's responsibility to sort it.
Reform took control of Sandwell Council in May.
That matters enormously when reading these papers.
Most of the 2025/26 annual performance figures are the record of the previous Labour administration. The 2026/27 budget was itself largely constructed and approved before the election, while Quarter 1 covers April, May and June and therefore straddles the political handover.
So I'm not going to indulge in the intellectually lazy game of taking every red box from last year and writing:
“LOOK WHAT REFORM HAS DONE!”
They didn't.
Housing problems, SEND delays, the accumulated Disabled Facilities Grant underspend, Sandwell Children's Trust finances, FOI performance and plenty more were already sitting on the desk when the keys changed hands.
But there is another side to that.
You inherit the office.
You inherit the filing cabinets.
You inherit the accounts.
And, unfortunately, you inherit whatever skeletons happen to be rattling around inside the cupboard.
Reform cannot fairly be blamed for creating those legacy problems.
It can, however, increasingly be judged on how quickly it identifies them, challenges them and fixes them.
That is the standard I think residents should apply.
And frankly, it is a much more useful standard than political mud wrestling.
First, a little unfinished business from August
The September pack contains the formal minutes of the 20 August Crisis and Resilience Fund call-in.
And they confirm something rather important.
One of the principal grounds for calling in the decision was that the Equality Impact Assessment had not been completed when Cabinet made its decision on 15 July.
We now know that was correct.
The minutes record that the Equality Impact Assessment was not completed until 14 August 2026 — nearly a month after Cabinet had taken the decision. Officers said it remained a live document and equality screening would also be undertaken for the pilot projects.
That doesn't automatically mean the decision was unlawful.
But it certainly validates the question:
Why wasn't that work completed before the decision?
There were some other interesting admissions.
Around 24,000 Sandwell children had previously been eligible for free school meal holiday vouchers, with around a quarter said to have SEND.
By the end of July, the new Crisis Fund had received 150 applications.
Officers said completed applications had been paid within two days, which is positive, and that the system had actually been resourced on the assumption that every previous voucher recipient might apply.
They also acknowledged that it wasn't clear whether benchmarking against comparator councils had taken place and that the new scheme's KPIs were still being developed.
Now, obviously, comparing 24,000 children with 150 applications isn't apples with apples.
Not every family receiving a school meal voucher will necessarily meet the definition of somebody experiencing an immediate financial crisis.
But 150 applications is still sufficiently small to justify asking:
Are people genuinely not needing help — or are some people simply not getting through the new front door?
That is precisely why data matters.
Councillor Luke Davies proposed treating the summer arrangements as a pilot, bringing vouchers back for October half-term and reconsidering matters once proper data had been collected.
That motion lost.
Councillor Nick Fawcett then moved “no further action”, seconded by Councillor Tuli Zefi, and that was carried.
The Cabinet decision therefore stands.
Fair enough.
But the Cabinet Member also promised a data-driven review before Christmas.
I would now expect to see that review.
Not disappear into the mystical municipal dimension where promises beginning with “we'll come back to that...” occasionally go to live.
Now for the performance report — and there is plenty of red ink
Sandwell monitors 198 corporate performance indicators.
At Quarter 4, 47 of the quarterly indicators with a RAG rating were green, 11 amber and 28 red.
That's actually an improvement on Quarter 3, where 31 were red.
So credit where it's due.
But 22 of the 28 red indicators had also been red the previous quarter.
That is much more interesting.
Annual performance is similarly mixed.
Of 138 annual measures which could be RAG rated:
71 were green, 25 amber and 42 red.
Only 51.4% were green, compared with 56.3% the previous year.
So while the number of outright red measures improved slightly, the proportion actually meeting target went backwards.
Then we get to the national benchmarking.
Against Sandwell's CIPFA nearest-neighbour councils, 57.89% of measures sit in the bottom two quartiles.
Against English metropolitan boroughs, it is 59.4%.
And against those metropolitan councils, 35.34% of Sandwell's comparable measures are in the bottom quartile.
The report rather cheerfully says there are “no surprises”.
Well, perhaps not.
But repeatedly being unsurprised by poor comparative performance isn't quite the same thing as fixing it.
If my roof leaks every Tuesday, by the fourth Tuesday it is no longer a surprise.
I would still like somebody to repair the roof.
The report contains one wonderfully candid sentence
Buried in the performance report is an admission I think councillors should underline.
The Council acknowledges that some business-plan actions are shown as on track, while the performance indicators supposedly connected to those actions remain amber or red.
It suggests this can happen because improvements take time.
Fair enough.
But it also admits that sometimes:
the actions might not be specific enough, might not identify how performance will be affected, or might themselves need reviewing.
Bingo.
This is something I've been banging on about for ages.
There is a world of difference between:
“We have completed the action.”
and:
“The action actually improved something.”
You can hold twelve meetings, create seventeen workstreams, recruit a programme manager, produce a dashboard and colour the action green.
If the resident is still waiting 41 weeks for the service, I am afraid the resident probably isn't going to frame the dashboard.
Scrutiny needs to concentrate much more heavily on outcomes, not administrative activity.
SEND: this is now flashing bright red
This is probably the biggest red flag in the entire pack.
Let's start with service performance.
Only 12.52% of Education, Health and Care Plans were completed within 20 weeks in Quarter 4.
The annual rate was 24.64%.
The target was 50.3%.
Meanwhile the average time taken for a statutory SEND assessment was:
41.21 weeks in Quarter 4.
Across the whole year:
46.42 weeks.
The benchmark being worked towards is 20 weeks.
So when we previously heard that the historic EHCP backlog had been cleared, that was undoubtedly an achievement.
But here is the difficulty.
Clearing yesterday's backlog isn't enough if today's cases are still taking twice as long as they should.
The September papers say the SEND transformation programme is still in its early stages, with more EHCP staff proposed, attempts to speed up Educational Psychologist assessments, improvements to frontline processes and better data.
All sensible.
But now look at the money.
And make sure you are sitting down.
£34.7 MILLION
The Dedicated Schools Grant High Needs Block is now forecasting a £34.700 million overspend in this financial year alone.
Not over ten years.
Not some theoretical future liability.
£34.7 million for 2026/27.
Sandwell supported 5,273 children with EHCPs at the end of 2025/26.
The forecast says that could reach 6,273 by the end of this financial year.
The Council's cumulative High Needs deficit is forecast to reach:
£40.753 MILLION
Government has indicated that, subject to approval of Sandwell's SEND reform plan, around £5.448m could be provided to cover 90% of Sandwell's cumulative deficit incurred up to the end of 2025/26.
That would still leave an estimated cumulative deficit at the end of this year of about:
£35.305 million.
And the report openly says Sandwell will be reliant on similar Government arrangements being created for later deficits.
There is also a separate £3.3m pressure on SEND home-to-school transport, driven by the increasing number of EHCPs and associated passenger demand.
Yes, SEND financing is a national crisis.
Sandwell is not alone.
But “other councils have the same problem” is context, not a strategy.
This surely now merits a dedicated scrutiny deep dive.
How many places do we need?
How much money is leaving Sandwell for independent and out-of-borough placements?
What new local provision is actually being delivered?
What savings does the transformation programme realistically expect?
By when?
What happens if those savings don't arrive?
And most importantly:
Are children getting better support while we try to get the finances under control?
Because the aim cannot simply be to make a spreadsheet cheaper.
The £623,000 overspend that isn't quite the whole story
The headline General Fund forecast sounds relatively benign.
Quarter 1 forecasts an overspend of just:
£623,000.
Against a net budget of £464.480m, that's around 0.1%.
No need to sound the financial air-raid siren just yet.
But look underneath.
Directorate budgets are actually forecasting an overspend of:
£4.351 million.
That is being substantially offset by £3.728m of underspends in centrally held corporate budgets.
The biggest service pressures are:
Adult Social Care: +£4.772m
and:
Children and Education: +£1.596m.
That distinction matters.
Residents hear “the Council is £623k over budget”.
Scrutiny should hear:
“Operational directorates are £4.351m over. What is generating the offset elsewhere and how sustainable is it?”
That is a rather different conversation.
Adult Social Care: another pressure growing rapidly
The principal Adult Social Care problem is external placements.
The Quarter 1 forecast identifies a £4.797m placement pressure, largely because new care packages are costing more on average than packages ending.
There are also pressures relating to Deprivation of Liberty Safeguards assessments and staffing, including some agency use.
Back in the previous scrutiny cycle, members were being told that placement forecasting had been relatively accurate and the external placement pressure discussed at one stage was far smaller.
The market has clearly moved.
So the question now isn't to point fingers retrospectively.
It is:
Have the assumptions underpinning the 2026/27 budget already been overtaken by reality?
And if so, what happens next?
The financial safety cushion is sitting right on the minimum
Sandwell's General Fund balance is forecast at £23.422m before the projected overspend.
That represents exactly 5% of the Council's net budget.
Independent guidance cited by the Council says authorities should generally hold between 5% and 10%.
So Sandwell is sitting at the bottom of its own range.
If the £623,000 forecast overspend materialises and is funded from that balance, the reserve would fall to around £22.799m, requiring an increased contribution next year to bring it back above the minimum.
Again, not financial catastrophe.
But not something to shrug at when SEND and Adult Social Care are showing this degree of volatility only three months into the year.
Disabled Facilities Grants — déjà vu with a stairlift
Regular readers may remember this one.
Back in March, scrutiny was told that around £6.6m of Disabled Facilities Grant funding had not been spent.
This money funds adaptations such as stairlifts and accessible bathrooms to help disabled residents live independently.
Members were told the Council intended to scale up provision during 2026/27 to bring down the accumulated grant balance.
Fast forward to the new Quarter 1 report.
The largest General Fund capital underspend is...
Drum roll please...
Disabled Facilities Grants.
Forecast underspend:
£5.978 million.
The report says a cumulative balance of unspent grant has built up over several years and that in-year expenditure will still not match the money available.
At some point we need to stop simply admiring the size of the carry-forward.
How many residents are waiting?
How long do they wait?
How many adaptations were completed in Q1?
How many will be completed this year?
What precisely did “scaling up provision” achieve?
There may be perfectly legitimate capacity and property constraints.
Let's see them.
But please don't tell a disabled resident waiting for an accessible bathroom that everything is fine because the money has been successfully reprofiled.
Ah yes... “reprofiling”
Local government has a wonderful vocabulary.
“Slippage” sounds so much nicer than “we didn't deliver it when planned”.
And “reprofiling” sounds almost glamorous.
The General Fund capital programme now stands at £98.919m.
Forecast spend:
£85.683m.
Expected to move into 2027/28:
£13.236m.
That includes the £5.978m DFG position.
There are also forecast underspends of £2.344m on Birchley Island and £3.480m on West Bromwich Cemetery, with both projects currently on hold pending review.
Over in the Housing Revenue Account, the capital budget is £118.459m, with forecast expenditure of £105.661m.
Another:
£12.798m
is expected to move into later years.
Most of that is linked to the new-build programme, including £7.244m forecast slippage on the Tipton Regeneration Scheme due to issues involving the main contractor.
Capital programmes always move around.
I understand that.
But when enough millions keep marching from one financial year to the next, somebody eventually needs to ask whether the problem is no longer individual projects.
Is this a wider delivery-capacity problem?
Housing: some progress, some very familiar red boxes
Housing continues to provide one of the clearest examples of genuine improvement sitting alongside unresolved risk.
Emergency repairs are now just over the 95% target.
Good.
Non-emergency repairs?
77.63%.
Target:
95%.
And almost half — 48.48% — of repair-related calls into the Corporate Contact Centre are described as avoidable calls from residents chasing repairs already reported.
That is an excellent example of why council departments should not be examined in silos.
The call-centre problem is partly a housing-repairs problem.
Fix the repair and you don't need to employ somebody to answer the resident asking:
“Any chance somebody is coming to fix this?”
Electrical compliance under the strengthened measure fell to 85.7%, against 100%, although the Council says this reflects a tougher methodology which now only counts properties where remedial work has been confirmed complete.
Completion is expected by October.
There were also 697 properties provisionally classed as non-decent, including cases involving Category 1 damp and mould hazards, while stock-condition surveys continue.
Again, mainly inherited problems.
But October is coming.
Scrutiny should remember the promise.
And then there are HMOs...
One performance indicator particularly caught my eye.
The private-sector housing team reports high caseloads and a surge in suspected Houses in Multiple Occupation.
There is currently a backlog of around 80 suspected HMO cases awaiting allocation, after initial doorstep checks indicated further enforcement investigation may be needed.
Anyone who has followed my planning and HMO work will understand why my eyebrows went up at that.
This is precisely the sort of figure councillors should be drilling into.
How old are those cases?
Where are they?
Are they licensed?
Are planning and housing enforcement sharing intelligence?
How many have fire or overcrowding concerns?
And what capacity is actually being added?
Because “awaiting allocation” sounds wonderfully administrative until you happen to live next door.
FOI and SARs: transparency still apparently buffering...
Subject Access Requests answered within timescale:
36%.
Target:
90%.
Annual performance:
50%.
Freedom of Information requests answered within timescale:
70%.
Target:
90%.
The Council says the Governance team is supporting directorates and is progressing a new system after looking at what Hackney uses.
Good.
But this one has now been red for long enough.
A transparency problem isn't solved by repeatedly explaining that a transparency problem exists.
We need a recovery date.
Backlog size.
Oldest outstanding case.
Performance by directorate.
And who is accountable when the statutory deadline is missed.
Not complicated.
Sandwell Children's Trust: improvement in children’s services does not erase financial risk
There is good news here.
Children's Services achieved a Good Ofsted judgement, and the number of children in care had fallen below 800 by March.
Those are genuine achievements from years of improvement work and should be recognised.
But the financial story still needs watching.
The pack says Sandwell Children's Trust ended 2025/26 carrying a deficit of around £18.2m.
An Internal Audit review triggered after late notification of deterioration in the 2024/25 financial position resulted in nine recommendations and only limited assurance.
The Trust had also been forecasting a £3.1m full-year overspend as of February 2026, including previous budgeting errors and cost pressures involving transport, translation and legal work.
The Trust has a new Head of Finance and improvement work is under way.
Excellent.
But this should remain firmly on the dashboard.
“Good Ofsted” and “sound financial control” are two different questions.
Both matter.
Contract management throws up some fascinating little nuggets too
Sandwell's long-running Serco contract is worth around £38m a year and runs until 2035.
The report notes that following changes associated with alternate weekly collections, missed-collection penalty points have been suspended until September 2026, meaning no financial penalties for missed bins during that period.
I'd like scrutiny to understand exactly why, what performance safeguards replaced those penalties and whether they return automatically this month.
Meanwhile at West Bromwich Leisure Centre, the migration to a new point-of-sale system has created discrepancies in usage figures, meaning Quarter 4 attendance data may not be fully accurate.
The proposed solution includes installing counters at reception doors to provide a comparison.
Again, not the end of civilisation.
But if we're paying organisations and measuring contract outcomes using data that everybody acknowledges might be wrong, somebody ought to keep an eye on it.
That somebody has a name.
Scrutiny.
Credit where credit is due
This is not an “everything is terrible” blog.
There are some genuinely good results in the pack.
Children's Services are now rated Good.
Adult Social Care is rated Good by the CQC.
Homelessness prevention is very strong and substantially above comparator levels.
Secondary school persistent absence has improved.
Sandwell has strong NEET performance.
Fire safety, water safety, lift safety and communal asbestos checks in council housing show strong compliance.
Recycling has improved significantly following alternate weekly collections.
Highways performance is nationally strong.
Business-support and social-value measures have also performed well.
Those things should be acknowledged.
Residents benefit from things working well regardless of which colour rosette gets the credit.
But good performance in one area does not buy immunity from scrutiny somewhere else.
The work programme worries me
Perhaps the biggest governance question isn't buried in the financial tables.
It is right at the back of the pack.
The Board is being asked to approve its work programme for the rest of 2026/27.
The report itself correctly says work programmes should remain fluid so new and emerging issues can be scrutinised quickly.
It also stresses that scrutiny is member-led.
Excellent.
Let's test that.
Because staring at the issues in this very agenda, I would expect this overarching Board to be thinking very seriously about dedicated scrutiny of:
SEND and the £40.753m High Needs position; Disabled Facilities Grants; Housing regulatory recovery; the promised Crisis and Resilience Fund review before Christmas; capital slippage; FOI/SAR recovery; and the Procurement/Contract Management Framework previously promised back to scrutiny.
Some operational detail may properly sit with specialist scrutiny boards.
Fine.
But financial sustainability, corporate governance and whether recommendations actually get delivered are precisely what this Board exists to examine.
The previous Board was specifically told that the final procurement strategy, updated Procedure Rules and Contract Management Framework would return to scrutiny.
So where is it?
A new municipal year must not mean old scrutiny commitments get wiped like a school whiteboard in September.
And this brings me to the Annual Scrutiny Report
The Board is also being asked to approve its annual report telling Full Council what scrutiny achieved during 2025/26.
There is nothing wrong with celebrating useful scrutiny.
But I'd like future annual reports to go further.
Don't merely tell us:
“Scrutiny considered X.”
Tell us:
“Scrutiny challenged X, recommended Y, and as a result Z actually changed.”
That is the measure that matters.
How many recommendations were accepted?
How many implemented?
How many overdue?
What measurable outcome changed?
How much money was saved?
How did a resident's experience improve?
Otherwise scrutiny risks becoming a very sophisticated reading club with microphones.
The handover test
So where does all this leave the new Reform administration?
It inherited a Council that had made major progress after intervention.
It also inherited some substantial unresolved problems.
Both statements are true.
The previous Labour administration deserves credit where improvements happened.
It also carries responsibility for legacy failures and risks built up on its watch.
Reform deserves neither blame for creating those historic problems nor a permanent exemption from responsibility for solving them.
The clock is now running.
SEND?
Inherited.
Housing C3?
Inherited.
DFG backlog?
Inherited.
Poor FOI/SAR performance?
Inherited.
Children's Trust historical financial problems?
Inherited.
Capital delivery problems?
Mostly inherited.
But the question from September onwards becomes increasingly simple:
What are you doing about them?
And six months from now:
What has actually changed?
That is fair scrutiny.
My questions for 10 September
If I were sitting around that scrutiny table, I would want the answers to a fairly simple set of questions:
SEND: What is the credible plan to prevent the High Needs deficit reaching £40.753m, what savings are assumed and when will they materialise?
EHCPs: When will 20-week compliance return to an acceptable level and what monthly trajectory has been set?
SEND transport: Why is there already a £3.3m pressure at Q1 and what was wrong with the original assumptions?
Adult Social Care: Why are external placements already £4.797m over budget and what mitigation is realistic?
DFGs: After scrutiny was told provision would be scaled up, why is another £5.978m still forecast unspent?
Capital delivery: Is the repeated slippage evidence of a wider programme-management or capacity issue?
Housing: Will the October repairs and electrical-compliance milestones actually be achieved?
Transparency: What are the recovery dates for FOI and SAR compliance?
Crisis Fund: When exactly will the promised pre-Christmas review return publicly, and will scrutiny see it?
Work programme: Why aren't these major unresolved corporate risks explicitly programmed for deeper scrutiny?
That's what I would call holding to account.
Not shouting.
Not party politics.
Not another round of “thank you for the comprehensive report”.
Follow the figures.
Follow the promises.
Then come back and ask whether anything changed.
Final thought
Sandwell's improvement story is real.
So are the risks.
The danger now is that success in escaping the worst years creates a new complacency where every problem is described as part of an “improvement journey”, every delay becomes “reprofiling”, every unfinished action becomes “ongoing”, and every red indicator acquires a paragraph explaining why it is perfectly understandable that it is red.
Explanations matter.
But eventually performance has to improve.
Because residents don't live inside an improvement plan.
They live in the house waiting for the repair.
They are the parent waiting for the EHCP.
They are the disabled resident waiting for the adaptation.
They are the person waiting for an FOI or SAR.
And they are the taxpayer funding every line of that 234-page report.
The cupboard is still full.
One of the bills now says £40.753 million.
And on 10 September, Sandwell's new scrutiny board has an opportunity to show whether it intends merely to catalogue the contents...
...or finally start emptying the cupboard.
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