A Depressing Budget – Unless You Are A Rat.

January

27

by admin // in Council Budget

4 comments

Well, the District Council budget went through on Tuesday night.

To put things in context, Rochford will receive government grant of ?42.76 per head of population for the next financial year. That’s the second lowest in Essex. Nect door in Castle Point theywill get ?52.18 , in Brentwood they will get ?52.08, in Basildon they will get ?65.68.

If we got the same as say Brentwood, the council would get an extra ?800,000.

Next year’s grant is a lot lower than this year’s- partly because the district doesn’t have to fund concessionary fares any more, but on top of that there is a very big cut. The council is also suffering financially because of low interest rates.

So the end result is a loss of some services. Some examples:

Grants to voluntary organisations are being cut from ?143,000 to ?90,000

Up till now people on benefits got a free pest control service , and every householder got free treatment of rats and mice. Now there will be a charge – just to save ?13,000

The District Council is now looking for help in paying for Great Wakering Leisure Centre, to save ?80,000 per year in future years. If no arrangements can be made, it will close.

Similarly, the council is looking for parish councils to take over public toilets, otherwise some of them could close. If they do, the council aims to arrange local schemes involving shops etc to provide toilets. The target saving here is ?15,000 per year.

Council officers will have to pay for drinks at work – bringing in ?28,000 per year, and also pay for parking, to bring in ?30,000 per year.

The council is aiming to cut the salaries bill from ?7,118,000 this year to ?6,591,000 next year.

Any good news? Well, the District Council Tax isn’t going up – the government is funding a coucnil tax freeze on the basis of a 2.5 percent increase for each of the next four years. And the administration has backed off, at least for now, from stopping free parking on Saturday afternoons. Instead, officers will prepare on car parking in general, aiming to improve income by ?100,000 per year. That was going to go to the cabinet, but Ron and Chris Black persuaded the councillors that the report should come to full council for discussion.

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About the author, admin

Can you explain why the Rochford figure per head is lower than that for Brentwood and Castle Point? Genuine query as it looks like frugal Council being treated harshly by central govt.

It’s a difficult subject -the government website isn’t much help:
http://www.communities.gov.uk/localgovernment/localgovernmentfinance/

But over many years the situation has been that we get a very low grant because we don’t have big problems of social deprivation, we aren’t a very rural area (so our dustcarts don’t have to drive 200 metres between each house) and also we have high levels of commuting. I’m not sure if it’s exactly the case now but it used to be that 25% of the grant was based on where the population worked rather than lived.

So as Rayleigh and Hockley are big commuter areas we suffer a lot from the third factor.

And regarding the social deprivation aspects we aren’t a rich area – but we have extremely high levels of owner occupation of homes – higher than say Kensington and Chelsea, which is generally thought of as a wealthy area.

Is the move to charge council staff for parking at work a precursor to the much publicised policy of charging all businesses for employee parking?

ST1 – I can see where you are coming from, but no, not in the foreseeable future.