Throughout this week the Stray Ferret is publishing excerpts from an interview conducted with Harrogate Borough Council’s chief executive Wallace Sampson OBE. 

In the final part of our interview, we asked Mr Sampson about the impact of the covid crisis:

Mr Sampson, the Stray Ferret has reported that the council faces a budget deficit of £10m due to covid. Are you preparing to have staff cuts?

It's been a very challenging year financially and going into the coming financial year it's going to continue.

Covid has affected us in a number of ways. Income has reduced from parking, leisure, Harrogate Convention Centre and trade waste.

Nevertheless, thanks to the fantastic efforts of staff across the organisation, we've been able to address the majority of these pressures through cost savings and containing expenditure.

We've also put a recruitment freeze in place across the organisation. We've gone out to recruitment for very few posts but we've instead used staff in services that we cannot do, such as leisure, and we've re-adopted them. We've made savings in the region of £2m and that's been a massive help to us.

We're probably going to be facing pressures into the next financial year. In answer to your question about losing jobs, we'll probably adopt a similar approach to last year which was really successful.

Wherever possible, we're going to avoid recruiting and we will limit spend to areas where spend is really necessary. We'll see if that gives an opportunity to manage the budget rather than making any job reductions. The challenge with job reductions is the effect on services.

What do you say to residents who are worried about the council tax rise that was agreed last month?

HBC's element of the council tax is relatively small in proportion to NYCC, fire and police. We charge £250 a year at band D whereas the NYCC element is £1,411. In the context of it, £250 for the year is relatively small.

If you look over the last decade, we've increased council tax by about 14% since 2010. It's going to £250 in the coming year but we were at £220 10 years ago.

Historically, the borough council has got a good track record in being able to keep council tax rises low because we've looked at a range of efficiency and income generation opportunities. We use those mechanisms so we don't have to pass on huge increases in council tax to the taxpayer.

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Read more of Mr Sampson's interview here:

• HBC chief executive interview: The vision for Harrogate is very clear


• HBC chief executive interview: the district needs more homes


• HBC chief executive defends civic centre figures

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What have been the hardest challenges for the council during the pandemic?

The biggest challenge for us was at the point we went into lockdown 12 months ago. It was a big transition for us as literally within the space of a couple of days we had to organise staff being able to work for home. That was a huge logistical exercise.

It was a slightly easier transition for us than other local authorities because we already had "agile working" in place, and that's partly because of our move to the civic centre.

Very quickly we had to put in remote meetings. We were one of the first in the region to get those meetings in place so the democratic function could take place.

The most important thing was to put in place mechanisms to support businesses and the community. If you've looked at the reports that have come through to the cabinet over the last year you'll get a sense of the pace we needed to work at and the scale of the operation we needed to put in place.

I have to say I'm really proud of the way council officers have responded, particularly within our economic development team and our business team who very quickly put in place mechanisms to pay the various covid grants that the government allocated to us.

I'm not exaggerating that many went above and beyond the call of duty and those businesses that received grants have been really grateful.

We've paid around 10,000 grants to about 5,000 businesses. In total, it's about £60m in grants that have been paid out over the last 12 months.

The other side is the support we've given to the most vulnerable in our community. We've done a lot of work, as well with North Yorkshire County Council, to help people shielding because they've been clinically extremely vulnerable.

We've done something in the region of 20,000 calls to people shielding in that time. We've used the staff in our leisure department to do that work because facilities obviously been closed.

It's been a really, really challenging year as a council but the standout is the way council staff from across the whole organisation have responded.