On 11 March 2026, Doncaster Council's Cabinet received the Quarter 3 Finance and Performance Improvement Report for 2025/26. The headline figure is a year-end forecast of zero net overspend. The figure beneath it, which the report records in its own executive summary, is £9.3 million.
The gap between the two is not a saving. A drawdown of earmarked reserves of £5.2 million fills most of it, and £4.1 million of council-wide offsets close the rest. The underlying operating position of the council, the figure the administration prefers members to set aside, is that its services are running £9.3 million above the budget Cabinet approved in February 2025.
Where the pressure is
Most of the overspend is in Adult Social Care. That directorate is forecast at £7.8 million over budget for 2025/26, the figure having worsened by £1.5 million between Q2 and Q3. Residential, domiciliary, and supported living provision are all running above allocation. The trajectory is one of acceleration in the final quarter of the financial year, at the point in the cycle when there is least time left to correct.
A further pressure sits outside the Q3 numbers. The Integrated Care Board has announced its intention to proceed with overdue Continuing Healthcare reviews. The practical effect, in cases where eligibility changes, is to transfer NHS-funded care onto local authority budgets. The council expects that pressure to land in 2026/27. The Q3 papers do not quantify it.
The reserves
The £5.2 million of reserves that Cabinet proposes to release includes the Risk Contingency reserve (around £500,000) and the Service Transformation Fund (around £465,000). Neither was established to mask in-year overspend. Both were held against specific future risks or transformation activity. Drawing them down now discharges them for 2025/26 and does not extinguish the underlying risks.
The Chief Finance Officer's own 2026/27 risk register records quantified risks of up to £12 million against uncommitted reserves of roughly £12.7 million. The margin of resilience entering next year is narrowing, not widening.
Savings
The council's 2025/26 savings target was £7.27 million. The Q3 report forecasts delivery of 57 per cent of that through the original savings programme. Lines in Culture, Heritage, Libraries, Waste, and Assets are formally rated as no longer achievable. For each, the plan recorded in the papers is the same. Alternatives will be identified as part of a new three-year savings programme covering 2026/27 to 2028/29. That three-year programme, with named schemes, responsible officers, and delivery dates, has not been published.
The cliff edge on schools
The Dedicated Schools Grant High Needs Block carries a projected deficit of £55.6 million at 31 March 2026, rising to £83.9 million in 2026/27 and £117.6 million in 2027/28.
A statutory accounting override has, for several years, kept that deficit off the council's General Fund. The override ends after 31 March 2028. On the council's own projection, the deficit it is accruing will be approaching £120 million at the point the protection falls away.
Central government has since announced a High Needs Stability Grant under which up to 90 per cent of the deficit accrued to March 2026 may be written down. That relief is conditional on the local authority submitting, and the Department for Education approving, a local SEND reform plan. Neither the plan nor a timetable for its submission appears in the Q3 Cabinet papers.
The double standard
This matters because of what happened 13 days earlier. On 26 February 2026, at full council, the Mayor attacked Reform UK's alternative budget on the grounds that it contained outer-year savings without fully costed plans. The same Chief Finance Officer who certified the administration's own budget as sufficiently robust had certified the opposition budget, on the same basis, a month earlier. The administration's own Q3 report, published 13 days after the Mayor's attack, now applies the same deferred-savings approach the Mayor criticised. It does so with less published detail, not more.
A consistent test would have found both budgets sound, or both wanting. The Mayor chose consistency in one direction only.
The arithmetic of the Q3 report is the administration's own. The £9.3 million is on the books before the reserves are used. The DSG deficit will be on them after. What the council does to close both, and whether it does so before the 31 March 2028 accounting cliff edge, is the next question Cabinet will be asked to answer.