Islington Council's Executive has approved an underspend of £8.5 million on its General Fund for the 2025/2026 financial year, a provisional outturn that has been largely attributed to corporate items.
Councillor Paul Convery, Executive Member for Finance, presented the budget monitoring report, highlighting that the underspend was primarily due to reduced interest on borrowings and increased interest on investments. The report also noted almost £10.3 million on a rather grandly called quarter 4. Corporate items.
Beyond interest rates, no other specific corporate items contributing to the underspend were detailed.
The £8.5 million will be held as a reserve for future discussion. When asked by Councillor Sheridan-Cates if the Executive had considered how this reserve might be spent, Councillor Convery stated, I'm sorry, I'm not going to discuss what we're spending, if that makes sense, because we haven't made a decision. We're only just now agreeing to note what the monitoring outcome tells us and we'll have a future discussion about what to do with that small windfall.
Councillor Convery also emphasised the significant improvement in the council's financial stability, noting that the level of overspends in departments and directorates has massively improved since the position let's say two or even three years ago where we were looking at very, very significant overspends or very significant underachievement of income expectations. So we're now in a very, very stable place.
The Executive also noted progress on agreed savings and approved revenue budget virements. The full details of the budget monitoring report can be found in the public reports pack for the meeting on 25th June 2026 Public reports pack 25th-Jun-2026 17.00 Executive.pdf.
Further information regarding the council's decisions can be found in the Decisions 25th-Jun-2026 17.00 Executive.pdf document. The agenda for the meeting was available as the Agenda frontsheet 25th-Jun-2026 17.00 Executive.pdf, and minutes from the previous meeting are available here.
