At the Aberdeenshire Council full council meeting today, Councillors have considered its final funding package which resulted in the Council receiving additional funding of £15.651m.
As a result, councillors made a number of funding commitments as follows:
£1m to support Mental Health and Wellbeing to augment the work that is currently being undertaken by the Health and Social Care Partnership in the following areas
- Increased and earlier intervention for mental health conditions and improving access to self-help supports and programmes as well physical activity to support recovery.
- Additional support for the promotion of mental wellbeing within Care Homes with a focus on dementia.
- Increased suicide prevention.
£2m to support transformation projects within the Health and Social Care Partnership, aimed at reducing out of authority placements, reducing care admissions through re-enablement, and increasing independence. Greater use of digital platforms for the delivery of services.
£2m to develop projects to support the Digital Strategy agreed in January 2021
- To improve online services for residents of Aberdeenshire
- Improvements to mobile working for employees
- Development of Robotic Programme Automation
£200,000 for Public Conveniences
£111,000 for area specific projects within the communities to support resilience during COVID recovery
£450,000 to augment Scottish Welfare Support and Discretionary Housing Payments
£2m Education PPP Maintenance Agreement – identified budgetary pressure in Financial Year 21/22, that cannot be mitigated within the existing budgets
£5,627,000 Cross Service additional reserves for upcoming unexpected costs.
£100,000 for the Medium Term Carbon Strategy.
£240,000 for demand-responsive transport.
They also agreed to fund some services that had savings identified – including instrumental music services, site opening hours in HRCs, some minor flooding works, and work on local bus services.
In addition, Councillors agreed on an additional one-off commitment from the Recovery and Resilience Reserve of £240,000 for additional call handling capacity in the Council’s contact centre.
