The Council is about to embark on its Annual Budget round. This starts each autumn and concludes in February when the Council makes its budget decisions and sets the Council Tax for the following financial year starting on the 1st April.
This year, as in previous years, we face an uphill struggle to identify further savings and improve services.
In general our costs of operating the Council are well under control and due to tight financial management and constantly driving our improvements in value for money, we expect to see costs only grow by around 1% over the coming year. However, we are expecting a large reduction in the funding we receive from Government again this year which will see the total amount of core Government funding drop by almost 45% since 2010/11. As yet we have no details on the actual reduction we face and the Government is remaining tight-lipped about telling us this, until some point in December when it will make an announcement. However, as many of our savings plans take time to identify and implement we are already on with the task of ascertaining what steps we can take to generate further savings and the monetary value that stems from these decisions.
Currently we are working on a plan that we will need to save 10% of our spend. This is a significant challenge for any organisation, whether in the public or the private sector, especially on the back of a number of years when similar savings have had to be produced.
We also recognise that the target of 10% could rapidly shoot up in December, if the Government reductions in our funding are larger than we are currently anticipating. All Managers have been asked to examine every area of spend and activity to see what savings can be found. Where possible we have asked that they avoid making savings were this would impact on the public, but after 5 years of large reductions in our funding this is becoming increasingly difficult, so we might now be entering into an era in which some service delivery has to sacrificed, as we simply don’t have the funding to keep providing services in the way that we would want.
What I can tell you is that we remain committed to not increasing council tax for the Hyndburn element of the overall council tax bill. This will be the fifth time in succession that we have ensured that local people do not have to pay anything more for local services and Council Tax has been effectively frozen since we took control of the Council in May 2011.
If you have any suggestions on how the Council could save money, I would always welcome hearing them and you can get in touch with me at gareth.molineux@hyndburnbc.gov.uk or call me on 07814 370117.
The Council’s Overview & Scrutiny will be reviewing the Budget in detail on the 16th February 2016 and everyone is welcome to come along and ask any questions that they might have at this meeting.
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