Our budget Where it comes from and where it goes The council’s budget has come under increasing pressure over recent years. The grant that we receive from government, which has historically formed the greater part of our annual revenue budget, has been cut dramatically since 2010. For 2014/2015, we have some £201million to spend on services coming from a variety of sources.
How current funding is made up: Public Health Grant: £14.2m Other grants, council tax etc: £72.6m
*Local 50% share of business rates: £24.8m *Section 31 grant: £1.5m
*Top-up grant: £25.9m *Revenue support grant: £62m
We have to find an estimated £13.1m of savings in 2014/15.
Key points from this year’s budget • Proposals for the introduction of the Living Wage for the lowest paid council workers. • National pay negotiations, which have resulted in a one per cent pay award for local government employees. • Five-year phasing out of the council tax discount for over-65s. • Further reductions of 45 posts across services to add to the 760 that have been lost in the last three years. • Increases in fees and charges for some services, including burials and marriage ceremonies, planning, building control, resident parking permit costs.
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• 1.9 per cent increase in council tax. This equates to a 44 pence per week increase for a Band D property in the council element of your council tax bill. We have frozen council tax for the last four years, when we accepted government grants for those councils that freeze their council tax. This grant won’t continue forever, and every time we accept the grant it leaves us with a financial gap to plug in the future. Accepting the grant this year would leave us with an additional £800,000 deficit in 2015/16. Although we’ve done as much as possible to protect council tax payers over the last four years, we cannot continue to absorb the impacts.
*These four components form the full Local Government Finance Settlement
Since 2010 we have saved £59million. That figure will be closer to £90million by 2017 and that’s only if the current government targets stay the same. We started with the savings agenda early and were able to save costs in a planned, considered, well-managed way. We’ve been able to minimise redundancy levels and maintain a good level of service in a number of areas as well as keep all of our libraries open. However a significant number of jobs have been lost since 2010, with the obvious impact that has on services. Despite the fact that this has been managed effectively, the impacts will become more visible in time.