It doesn't seem like twelve months ago, but this time last year the county council's chief finance officer warned of an unprecedented potential overspend in our budget.

We were only two months into the 22/23 financial year. But finance director Angie Sinclair warned us that - without dramatic action - we could be overspent by some £40 million on our revenue budget of £630 million.

This was because of the perfect storm of Covid after-effects, soaring demand for our services and rapidly rising inflation following Vladamir Putin's totally misguided invasion of Ukraine and its effects on fuel, food prices and the cost of raw materials.

We'd only set our budget four months previously when five per cent inflation was looking like the highest it could go. Who knew then that we would be into double digit inflation within a few months.

Now, unlike central Government, local authorities have a legal duty to balance the books so we took swift action.

We set up a group of senior officers from every department to go through our budget line by line and identify any savings that could be made. That process is continuing and we are establishing a rigorous in-year savings programme.

We've also managed to increase income and wring more benefit from various sources of funding. And we've achieved higher than anticipated interest income and business rates.

In all we managed to identify a total of £25.4 million worth of in-year savings, income and alternative uses of funding.

This all meant that when my Cabinet considered the outturn on our 22/23 budget earlier this month, we could report that we finished in the black with a small underspend of £156,000.

Given where we were 12 months ago, I am very proud we have  kept our budget in the black and I want to pay tribute to all our staff across Devon for their efforts in helping to achieve this outcome.

If we had not done so, the result would be a significant overspend and we would have had to balance the budget using our reserves - the cash we keep in the bank for emergencies. You can obviously only raid the reserves once and that just builds in trouble for the next year if you haven't tackled the overspending.

So we will continue with the cross-council examination of our budget as we build a sustainable, long-term model for our finances.

But, make no mistake, we’re not out of the woods yet. The economic and health legacy from the pandemic and the war in Ukraine have rocked the global economy. The effects will be felt for some time and our finances will continue to be under severe pressure.

And that's not just me making political statements. As well as bringing us good news in her report on the budget outturn, Angie Sinclair also commented: "Demand for services is higher than ever before, prices continue to rise and labour market shortages are still being experienced.

"This is being felt acutely within our adults and children's services. This trend of rising demand and rising prices is expected to continue into 2023/24 which will create a very challenging financial environment for the council."

But our job is to look after the people of Devon and I believe we are doing a good job. We are determined to safeguard support for our young people, the old and the vulnerable. At the same time we are committed to supporting our businesses and entrepreneurs in helping our economy to grow and providing the conditions for good, well-paid jobs for our residents.