Nottingham City Council is aiming to review 550 of its assets by the end of next year to decide whether they should be sold off as it continues to try and reduce its debt. The council has decided to sell properties including a large car park in recent months in a bid to make savings.
Progress is continuing on reducing the city council's debt, with the authority revealing earlier in the year that it had reduced the £1.2 billion figure by £200 million. The council recently avoided Government commissioners being sent in to run it following problems such as the Robin Hood Energy collapse.
Instead, an Improvement and Assurance Board (IAB) was given more power in overseeing council improvements and as part of this, the council was given a list of 67 requirements that it had to fulfil by the end of November. Now, Nottingham City Council has published its updated 'Together for Nottingham Plan', which seeks to address its financial challenges.
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One of the key updates to the plan is around Nottingham City Council's assets, including its properties. Over the last two years, the council says it has generated £30 million from these assets and as a result, it is now going to review hundreds more of them.
The update to the plan reads: "Now most of the actions from the original Together for Nottingham Plan are implemented and the capital receipts being delivered are meeting the forecast levels, the next step is a revision to the original plan.
"This will focus on increasing the numbers of assets coming forward for disposal both in the short and medium term, while minimising potential revenue loss to the council, and the implementation of a new model for the management of property assets across the council."
To achieve this, the updated plan means that the council is aiming to have completed 150 asset reviews and to have presented recommendations on all of them by December. The council has then given itself until December 2023 to complete another 400 asset reviews.
The updated financial plan will be discussed at a full city council meeting on Monday (October 31) and documents to be discussed there also reveal the cost of the IAB's continued oversight at the council. The Government's directions to Nottingham City Council will last until September 1, 2024, unless this is amended beforehand.
This means that the cost of the IAB needs to be met up until that point. The council had already budgeted for the IAB to be in place throughout the 2022/23 and 2023/24 financial years to the tune of £300,000 per annum.
The running of the IAB until September 2024 will therefore cost another £125,000. Council leader David Mellen and Chief Executive Mel Barratt write in the foreword to the 'Together for Nottingham Plan': "We are under no illusions about the size and scale of the challenge ahead of us, but working constructively with the Government, our partners, and the people of Nottingham, we are confident we can take the necessary actions, at the required pace, and to the desired quality, to deliver the fundamental changes needed."
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