Finance chiefs will be able to dip into a contingency fund to help cover the escalating costs of Warwickshire County Council's major building projects.

Cabinet members agreed a £15m emergency pot at their meeting last week after hearing that prices of construction materials had risen by more than 25 per cent.

The council's portfolio holder for finance and property, Cllr Peter Butlin said: "Capital programmes are coming back to us for a top-up because of inflation. We have identified 47 different projects across the county which will be impacted. 

"We thought, rather than bringing them back on an individual basis to cabinet and sometimes full council which is time-consuming and delays the project, we should set up a contingency fund to deal with all these different projects. This will speed the process up and not log jam ourselves.

"Decisions will still come through the section 151 officer [chief financial officer] and myself and we will be careful to make sure that anything that comes through to this fund is inflationary. This is a way for us to keep these projects on track." 

A report presented to councillors explained that money for the contingency fund would come from the council's capital investment fund [CIF], reducing that to just over £100m.

It added: "Building and highway construction and maintenance industries continue to exhibit strong evidence of instability on the back of the EU Exit and the Covid pandemic, compounded locally by the impact of HS2, with the consequence that inflation indices have been increasing over the last two years. 

"This has fed through into cost pressures for the authority and the on-going war in Ukraine is having a significant impact on top of these existing challenges, affecting the availability and cost of critical materials such as steel, iron and timber. 

"Oil and gas prices have also risen rapidly and remain unstable. Bituminous products such as asphalts are being heavily impacted and materials that require intensive energy input – bricks, plastics and ceramics – are expected to continue to rise as are the costs of transportation due to rising fuel prices.

"The most difficult judgement in determining the level of the CIF set aside to meet the inflationary uplift on the approved capital programme is to ensure it is sufficient without reducing the remaining CIF unnecessarily."