Medway Council faces a £12.5 million budget gap - mainly due to funding children's social care placements.

The authority's finance officers revealed the predicted overspend at a meeting of the cabinet yesterday(Tuesday, August 23).

Leader Alan Jarrett (Con) explained almost all of the pressure was coming from the children's services department.

He said: "It's not unusual to be projecting a substantial overspend at this particular time in the financial year, but that it doesn't make it any happier reading.

"We have put in substantial additional funds into children's services on a year-by-year basis - £22 million over the last three years.

"As colleagues will know, we are judged as 'Inadequate'; there are certain expectations made on us from government - from Ofsted, on behalf of government - and it's up to us to turn this around."

The budget for children's services was set at just less than £57 million in February and officers are currently forecasting an overspend of £7.5 million in this area.

A report presented to councillors details how the vast majority of these costs come from funding children's social care placements.

The 2022/23 budget included a £3.8 million hole which was plugged using reserve funds.

The same report indicates if the current situation does not change between now and February, the authority will need to use £4.8 million from reserves.

The council was subject to scrutiny from a government-appointed inspector after it received an "Inadequate" rating from Ofsted in 2019.

Since then, it has been subject to monitoring visits from the watchdog, the most recent of which took place in May.

Each inspector's visit has looked at different areas of care.

Another £1.6 million needs to be found for funding adult social care, which officers say is largely down to placement costs.

A Freedom of Information request carried out by the Local Democracy Reporting Service shows that, as of Tuesday, August 16, there were 91 adults who were on the council's waiting list for care packages.

At the same time last year, there were 60 people on the list.

Medway Labour Group leader, Cllr Vince Maple, said: "I think there's a fundamental funding crisis across upper tier local government in both children and adult's social care for a number of reasons; you've got a perfect storm of people leaving the profession, placements going up in costs because of inflationary pressures, and potentially more people needing to access services, so it's a pretty difficult set of circumstances.

"I think it's worth saying that there are concerning times and once again we see the budget of this council in a very difficult place."