A wide-ranging council transformation programme is now targeting more than £50 million of recurring savings.

Southampton City Council launched the ‘adapt | grow | thrive’ programme last summer with the aim of making major savings to secure the authority’s financial stability.

Leaders said £9.5 million of transformation savings had been delivered early in the current financial year and the proposed budget for 2025/26 relied upon £34.56 million of savings being secured.

Cllr Simon Letts, deputy leader and cabinet member for finance, said the programme was the “central plank” of the council’s budget balancing process.

“We’re making good progress,” Cllr Letts said.

“We have got a target we are driving towards and in fact the numbers have crept up slightly as we’ve looked in detail at what we’re doing.

“Further savings have come forward, so we are actually slightly better off in terms of the transformation numbers than we were in July and November and of course we keep this under regular review.”

When launched in July, the 28-project programme was expecting to make £42.65 million of recurring savings by the end of 2028/29.

Latest projections have seen this increase to £50.92 million, with the majority coming forward in the next two years.

The council is using a red, amber, and green rating system for each project to set out the current confidence level of achieving the expected savings.

A report to cabinet says £43.27 million of savings have high delivery confidence (green), with £2.57 million listed as saving identified but less assurance (amber) and £4.99million described as saving not yet validated with high enough degree of confidence (red).

“We expect this position to improve over the coming months as we complete further work to develop these business cases,” the report adds.

The transformation programme is estimating a reduction of 135 to 159 full time equivalent council posts out of total of approximately 3,100.

This includes 74 posts that are currently vacant, with 61 to 85 redundancies roles over the next two years.

The report says this is a reduction in the number of redundancies from the update in October, with more vacant posts now expected to be removed.