The Resources Directorate has four main areas of responsibility:

• The provision of insightful, proactive and efficient business support services.
• Ensuring residents receive the benefits to which they are entitled.
• Ensuring the Council is supported and well governed, enabling front line services to deliver better outcomes for Torfaen citizens
• Managing the Greater Gwent Pension Fund and Administration in accordance with good governance

The Directorate serves a wide variety of customers, principally internal colleagues and Members. Our ambition is not only to be excellent at doing the basics, but to add real value to the organisation and support the Council in realizing its ambitions and aspirations. We have an extremely professional workforce, and our real strength is taking time to truly understand our customers and building strong working partnerships to help achieve our collective goals. Valued members of the wider “Torfaen” team, we are not afraid of change and transformation; indeed, we actively encourage it so that we can be as efficient and effective as possible and thus make the most difference to our residents’ lives.

The financial outlook facing the public sector and local authorities across Wales is extremely challenging and Torfaen is no exception. To illustrate this, the MTFP to be published at the end of February 2024 details a financial challenge of £35.2million over the four years from 2025/26, with financial forecast for 2025/26 alone indicating a financial challenge of £14.5million. This scale of the challenge, and the speed at which it has arisen is quite unprecedented, and is being driven by a real terms reduction in funding and the rising cost of and demand for services..

While the financial landscape is very challenging, this is not a time to lessen the council’s ambition or resolve to meet these challenges head on, indeed it is a time to restate and focus more determinedly on that ambition. Our citizens will not accept anything less. Like all responsible councils, efficiencies will need to be sought and costs will need to be reduced in a sustainable way that protects frontline services as far as possible. To that end, the council will be taking a thematic and cross-cutting approach to reductions rather than applying percentage cuts to all budgets. The successful candidates will be at the heart of making this happen.

Click here to read a recent Cabinet paper (January 2024) which indicates the direction of travel.