SAVINGS to the council budget are not currently being met, and could result in a shortfall of £5.6m from the saving target.

When the budget was drawn up in February, savings of £26.7m were outlined, and marked the single largest ever projected savings made to Wiltshire’s budget.

The council is due to miss the target by 21 per cent, with the reason behind the shortfall placed on services being slow to begin making savings.

The largest savings were targeted to come from adult social care, with £5.66m taken from its budget, and the first reports into the projected savings show that this is the only service on track to deliver all of the saving required.

Learning disabilities and mental health services were given a saving target of £1.94, but the council believes £1m of these savings will not be be made in 2018/19.

All other services given a saving target including family and children’s , education and highways and transport services are likely to fail to deliver targeted savings.

A Revenue Budget Monitoring report for the first quarter of the financial year released during a cabinet meeting held in County Hall on Tuesday stated that although some extra savings can be made, because of delays, the benefits will not be felt until next year.

Philip Whitehead said: “We should take significantly earlier action so that future savings are actioned from April 1 and not later on through the year.

“We have to get better at managing our budget on every single source and the only way to do that is to maintain the pressure.

“It’s very easy to be very down everyone knows the financial restriction we are under and be very easily down but there are still opportunities there, to deliver the services we want to do and find was of managing our budget and increasing our budget in future years.”

The council is also on track to have an overspend on services by £2.558m, equal to about 0.8 per cent of the total budget, or two and a half days of council spending. Last year the council had an estimated £4m overspend and ended in a surplus. Cllr Whitehead described the statistics as the most unreliable for forecasting because they were based on figures from July about estimates until the end of the financial year in April 2019.