‘Incredible pressure’ on a fund set up to support people struggling financially means that an additional £400,000 agreed by East Ayrshire Council won’t meet the demand.

The Scottish Welfare Fund (SWF) provides crisis grants and community care grants to residents in need.

In June the council agreed to maintain the crisis grant criteria at ‘low’ to ensure as many people as possible could access support.

However, community care criteria was tightened, limiting the numbers accessing those grants.

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Just three months on, Joe McLachlan, chief finance officer, said that there was already a large overspend on crisis grants and asked councillors to approve the transfer of £400,000 from an underspend in the finance and ICT service.

This will allow it to remain at the current criteria.

Mr McLachlan told the Cabinet that ‘continued and sustained pressure’ continued to be experienced by the fund.

He said: “You already approved the transfer of £250,000 to add to our annual £1m million budget for the Scottish welfare Fund in June this year.

“The paper before you asks for you to approve an additional four hundred thousand pounds transfer from the Finance and ICT underspend to help sustain that Scottish welfare fund budget.

“I have to be upfront with members and say we’re seeing incredible pressure on this budget and and credible number of applications coming in each day.

“Even with the £250,000 already applied and with the £400,000, it is unlikely that even with that that we’ll be unable to maintain the eligibility at low throughout all of this financial year.”

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He added that the council is also likely to be £1m over budget when it comes to council tax reductions.

“The council tax reduction (CTR) or council tax benefit that’s provided to 14,000 of our households across East Ayrshire’s annual budget is around £9.5m.

“Last year, we spent around £10 million on that and very early indications show that for this year we won’t spend half a million pounds more than our budget –  we are likely to spend possibly a million pounds more than budget on CTR.”

He added that he would lobby for the nation CTR budget to be increased to recognise ‘the substantial and increased demand’ being placed on councils.

The Cabinet agreed to transfer the additional £400,000 to its Scottish Welfare Fund budget.