Better financial control resulted in West Dorset District Council ending the financial year with £792,500 more than anticipated.

Councillors are being told that the saving has been achieved by reducing costs and increasing income on the authority’s £56.4million annual spend.

The cash is now in a general reserve fund and will be available between now and April 2019 when the council ceases to exist. If not spent the money is expected to be transferred to the new, unitary, Dorset Council.

Some of the savings have been achieved by not filling vacant posts amounting although councillors were told at the Strategy Committee meeting that services have still been delivered to the public.

While most departments did better than predicted some did not perform so well – planning and building control was £111,000 worse than anticipated; economy, leisure and tourism was £84,500 down and ‘assets and infrastructure’ is listed as £166,800 worse than projected.

The income figures for planning were down on expected levels because fewer planning applications than expected materialised, resulting in a drop in fee income. The council says it has also had to pay out more than planned on agency staff to cope with vacancies.

For leisure and tourism, the lower total was attributed to some costs being higher than projected for the move of the Dorchester Tourist Information Office and additional costs at Bridport Harbour for disposing of a buoy, containing lithium.

Changing car parking machines to take the new £1 coin accounted for some of the downturn in the predicted “assets and infrastructure” figure. Other changes included an accounting figure for ‘dilapidations’ on property owned by the council.

The end of year report says that the roll-out of Universal Credit in December 2017 led to “an increase and complexity of workload” for staff and additional cost in helping those who switched to the new payments system.

Of the three partner councils, North Dorset is the only one meeting the 20-day target for processing new housing benefit claims – while West Dorset is on 22 days and Weymouth and Portland Borough Council on 21 days.

All three councils report that around 20 per cent of all calls to them concern housing advice, with around 15 per cent for general inquiries and a similar figure for planning issues. One in ten callers abandon their query at West Dorset and Weymouth and Portland – with the average time before that happens of two minutes, 27 seconds.