All departments to face pressure as Sheffield Council aims to save £40m

The council’s total revenue budget for 2017/18 is likely to be set at £395.6 million.

This includes children and family support, sport, recreation and highway maintenance, as well as adult social care, council housing and libraries.

All of these will face pressures and changes in order to achieve savings of £40m.

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Individual grants will reduce or disappear. This year’s budget reveals the city will lose £2.3m as a result of changes to the new homes bonus scheme, introduced by the coalition government to incentivise house building. The grant will fall to just over £7m.

But Sheffield will get a one-off payment of £2.7m from a new adult social care support grant.

The council also gets funding for adult social care through the better care fund.

It shares a budget with the Sheffield Clinical Commissioning Group, and discussions on the share of cash this year are ongoing.

But the council will get an extra £2.2m from a new grant called the improved better care fund to support vulnerable adults. This should rise to £22m by 2019/20.

The council hopes to save £2m by changing its children’s centre service to a whole family approach, bringing services closer to people while using existing buildings and working with other organisations.

Activity Sheffield, which works to improve health and wellbeing – particularly in deprived communities – will close, saving the council £83,000.

Spending on cultural and sports facilities will drop by about £1.7m.

Charges for some services such as bereavement are due to go up.

And the council hopes to make yet further savings through restructuring across most departments, and integrating services and teams.