The £600,000 cut to York's libraries will not go ahead, after a two-year review found now is not the right time. The council's own budget is £2.3m over.
The £600,000 the council planned to cut from York’s library service will not be taken. A two-year statutory review has concluded that “now is not the right time to make changes to the service”, and the saving is to be written off and put back into the budget as unavoidable growth.
The conclusion is set out in the Quarter 1 finance report that went to the council’s Executive on Wednesday evening (City of York Council).
The same report shows why it stings. The council is forecasting a £2.3m overspend on a net budget of £187m, and still has around £11m of savings to find to balance this year’s books.
What the report actually says
The Executive was asked to:
Accept that the budgeted savings relating to the Explore contract are not to be progressed and that the undelivered savings (£600k) will need to be added into growth as part of 2027/28 budget process
The saving had been agreed in 2024 and was to come off the council’s payment to York Explore Library and Archives Mutual, the staff-and-community-owned body that runs libraries and archives on the council’s behalf. It was never achieved. The report describes it as the largest single variance in its directorate, “a saving of £600k has still not been achieved following a lengthy process with the client”.
The review that stopped it
The process was not a change of political mind so much as a statutory exercise that ran its course. Under Department for Culture, Media and Sport guidance, the council spent roughly two years on:
- a city-wide engagement asking residents what they need from their library service
- combining that with user trend data, demographic demand and other measures to produce a York Libraries Assessment of Need
- using the assessment as the basis for talks with York Explore about what savings the operator contract could bear
The report’s conclusion is that, given “the role libraries will play in the future through the developing Neighbourhood Working Model, now is not the right time to make changes to the service”.
The £600,000 does not vanish. It has to be added back as unavoidable growth in the 2027/28 budget, which means finding it somewhere else next year.
The wider picture: £2.3m over
| Service area | 2026/27 net budget (£‘000) | Forecast variation (£‘000) |
|---|---|---|
| Children & Education | 32,808 | -76 |
| Adult Social Care & Integration | 81,273 | +3,722 |
| Environment & Regulation / City Development | 16,948 | +1,184 |
| Housing & Communities | 6,676 | +547 |
| Corporate & Central Services | 48,804 | -2,583 |
| Contingency | 500 | -500 |
| Total including contingency | 187,009 | +2,294 |
The £2.3m forecast is better than this point last year, when the council was projecting a £4.4m overspend. The 2025/26 year ended with a £1.5m underspend, which went into reserves. The report is blunt that this is not a trend: “many of the underspends in 2025/26 were either one off or budgets have been adjusted”, and there is “a recurring overspend within Adult Social Care, which continues to be of concern”.
Adult social care is the pressure
Adult Social Care and Integration is forecasting a £5,522k overspend before mitigations, cut to £3,722k on the assumption that £1,800k of savings and mitigations land by the year end.
Inside that:
- £4,253k is a budget rebasing pressure not yet attributed to any particular care budget
- £1,023k on staffing, mostly social work staff, 9.9% over budget
- £873k on residential care, 3.7% over
- £460k on supported living
- offset by underspends on nursing care (-£528k), home and day support (-£259k) and direct payments (-£241k)
The directorate was given £10.3m of growth for 2026/27, of which £4m was for price inflation and £4m for underlying pressures on external care budgets. Full Council approved only £400k of savings for adult social care at budget setting.
Reserves
The general fund reserve stood at £8.9m at the start of 2026/27, against a minimum level of £7.4m set in the February 2026 budget report. The report says the reserve is available to cover the year end position if mitigations fall short, but warns that drawing substantially on it would mean building growth into the 2027/28 budget to put it back.
One thing we could not confirm
The Executive met at 4.30pm on Wednesday 9 September. When this was published, the council had not yet posted a decision record or minutes for that meeting, so the formal resolution is not confirmed. Everything above is taken from the report put before it, which is the council’s own published account of the review’s outcome. We will update this article when the decision record appears on the meeting page.
What it means for you
- If you use a York library: no reduction in the service is now planned. The review that could have cut opening hours or branches has concluded against changes for the time being.
- If you were watching the council tax line: the £600,000 has to be found in the 2027/28 budget round instead, as unavoidable growth.
- If you want to read the evidence: the York Libraries Assessment of Need is the document that decided this, built from a city-wide engagement exercise.
- Next milestones: the Quarter 2 monitor is due at Executive on 3 November 2026, and the 2027/28 budget is set by Full Council next February. Our council tax bands page has this year’s figures.
Sources
- Quarter 1 2026/27 Finance and Performance Monitor, Executive, 9 September 2026
- Executive meeting of 9 September 2026: agenda and papers
- Explore York Libraries and Archives
Figures are as published in the Quarter 1 2026/27 Finance and Performance Monitor. Forecasts change through the year.
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