1. To thank the scrutiny commissions for their comments on the draft capital budget.
To recommend to Council the following:
a) Approve the release of the Capital Fund, a revenue reserve, to the Managed Reserve strategy of £90m. (see para 4.4 of the report submitted by the Director of Finance) ;
b) Approve the change in financing for the 2024/25 capital programme, to include prudential borrowing (see para 4.5 of the report);
c) Approve reductions to the 2024/25 capital programme as described at paragraph 4.8;
d) Approve the capital programme, together with the necessary prudential borrowing, for schemes described in this report and summarised at Appendices 2 to 5;
e) For those schemes designated immediate starts, delegate authority to the lead director to commit expenditure, subject to the normal requirements of contract procedure rules, rules concerning land acquisition and finance procedure rules;
f) Delegate authority to the City Mayor to determine a plan of spending for each policy provision, that may be added in-year, and to commit expenditure up to the maximum available;
g) For the purposes of finance procedure rules:
• Determine that service resources shall consist of service revenue contributions; HRA revenue contributions; and government grants/third party contributions ringfenced for specific purposes.
• Designate the operational estate, the children’s capital maintenance programme, the highways maintenance programme and the transport improvement programme as programme areas, within which the director can reallocate resources to meet operational requirements.
h) Delegate to the City Mayor:
• Authority to increase any scheme in the programme, or add a new scheme to the programme, subject to a maximum of £10m corporate resources in each instance and to borrow whilst remaining within the prudential limits for debt which are proposed in the treasury management strategy (elsewhere on the Council agenda);
• Authority to reduce or delete any capital scheme, subject to a maximum reduction of £10m; and
• Authority to transfer any “policy provision” to the “immediate starts” category.
i) Delegate to directors, in consultation with the relevant deputy/assistant mayor, authority to incur expenditure up to a maximum of £250k per scheme in respect of policy provisions, that may be added in-year, on design and other professional fees and preparatory studies, but not any other type of expenditure.
j) Approve the capital strategy at Appendix 6.