Social Services in Powys still face a funding gap of just under £4m this financial year despite councillors agreeing a bailout worth just over £3.1m.

At a Powys County Council meeting on 5 December, social services chiefs explained that they need more money to deal with the increasing demand for care packages for adults and the higher costs of placements for children in care.

Increasing costs in adult and children’s social care services is not unique to Powys and are having an impact on local authority budgets all across the UK.

The report said that Adult Social Care is predicting to be £3.082m over its budget of £92.688m this year, while Children’s Social Services is expected to be £2.745m over its budget of £30.745m.

Director of corporate services and s151 officer, Jane Thomas said: “Council approved an additional £8.8m for Social Services when the budget was approved in March, so that has already been allocated and is expected to exceed that.

“With the delivery of savings and with that additional money there is still a projected overspend of £5.827m.

“What the virement is proposing to do is to allocate £948,000 from a specific reserve and would clear that out and allocate the remaining revenue budget of £2.184m which is held in the corporate risk budget.”

“With those allocations this will leave those services with a projected overspend of £3.9m.

“We’re working to reduce and resolve that.

“Underspend from other services will have to contribute to the £3.9m gap that remains to bring us back to a balanced budget.”

Unless this money is found from other departments – Ms Thomas explained that they council would then have to use some of its £50million reserves to balance the budget at the end of the year.