As a council, we want to continue supporting our most vulnerable residents as well as investing and supporting the local recovery following the coronavirus pandemic.
We have had to propose very difficult options as we developed the budget for 2021/22 to ensure the council can deliver a balanced budget.
We have to provide some services by law – these are called statutory services and include areas like education, children’s services, adult social care, waste collection, planning, housing services, road maintenance and libraries. We do have some flexibility in how these services are delivered.
We want to continue providing high qualityContinue reading
As a council, we want to continue supporting our most vulnerable residents as well as investing and supporting the local recovery following the coronavirus pandemic.
We have had to propose very difficult options as we developed the budget for 2021/22 to ensure the council can deliver a balanced budget.
We have to provide some services by law – these are called statutory services and include areas like education, children’s services, adult social care, waste collection, planning, housing services, road maintenance and libraries. We do have some flexibility in how these services are delivered.
We want to continue providing high quality but vital services for adults and children and spend nearly £46 million on adults and nearly £24 million on children’s services each year. We are proposing to invest an additional £1.5m in our children’s services to ensure that we can continue to support them.
In our proposals we have set aside further spending in the borough through the capital investment programme and are proposing to invest £11.5 million in affordable housing over the coming years and £16m for Maidenhead redevelopment. Our highways work programme looks to invest £1.6million.
We also provide some additional services which we don’t have to by law – these are called discretionary services and include things like sports and leisure facilities, maintaining parks, promoting tourism and the arts, and supporting charities, some of which pay for themselves, some of which are subsidised by council tax payers.
To provide these services, we are primarily funded by central Government grant allocations, Council Tax, business rates and income from some services we provide, like parking charges.
Over recent years all councils have faced significant spending reductions as part of government efforts to reduce the national budget deficit. The amount councils receive from central Government has dropped significantly as a result.
This year has been a difficult year and had it not been for COVID-19 we would have been in a much better position. COVID-19 has limited our ability to bring in income through a variety of ways – parking being the main issue. However, we have adapted during the pandemic and we plan to continue using virtual technology for meetings across the whole council. This will allow us to look at our office space and potentially reduce our carbon footprint.
Many other councils up and down the country are in a similar position with the additional pressures on services during the pandemic and we don’t know the full extent of it yet – the economic and health effects on our borough are still to be realised and we will need to be mindful of that in the coming years. This is the single biggest economic impact in local government, the entire sector is coming to terms with it and how it will impact our residents and our councils going forward.
We are limited to the council tax increases because of government limits but we do need to increase them to continue to support high quality services.
The council’s current central Government allocation, plus level of support from COVID-19 funding from the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG), is not yet known. As such, estimates and assumptions have been used to calculate the 2021/22 budget, based on allocations so far this year.
These are only proposals and for the first time we are asking for your views. We are open to viable alternatives to ensure we deliver a balanced budget.
