Council tax rise will be 9.9% with remaining £1.7m budget hole set to be plugged in a matter of days

Council tax will be going up by 9.9% however the move has meant there is still £1.7m of cash still yet to be found days before the council budget is formally signed off.

The council have been closing a forecast £22.6m hole in the budget for the coming year, with the council tax element of fund raising now firmed up. A range of ‘mitigations’ – mainly £13m of cuts as readers will be aware – have been made (a new list below) across all council departments.

A message we have previous reported is reiterated to councillors in the formal reports before the Executive Board next week which note without these mitigations, a financial deficit of £22.6m would be forecast over the next year and £27.3m over the following two years.

Previously the council tax figure has been stated as likely 12.5% – however it looks likely to come in just under 10%. This current financial year figures state the council raised £78,280,023 through council tax, and projects £86,707,296 will be raised in the coming year (+10.76%), the same figures year on year for central funding from Welsh Government was £224,836,836 and are now projected to be £231,962,589 (+3.1%).

The report states the overall budget for the council and the tax rise, “The net expenditure is £318,669,885 and results in an overall increase in Council Tax at Band D of 9.9%. The levy paid to the North Wales Fire and Rescue Service has increased by £907k. This equates to an equivalent 1.3% increase in Council Tax. The increase of 9.9% therefore incorporates 8.6% in respect of Council budgets and 1.3% in respect of the North Wales Fire & Rescue Service budgets.”

That equates to £1,598.00 at a band D property.

The proposed budget as it stands

The Leader of Wrexham Council Cllr Mark Pritchard described it as “….probably one of the most difficult processes that I’ve ever had to face as a Leader, it has been very difficult for all of us. None of us come into local politics to cut services. We come in to local politics to improve services and represent our constituents. This is not of our making.”

He added he would have favoured a bigger increased in the tax, “Personally, if I could have gotten a little bit more, I would have gone a little bit higher, because for every 1%, we get £600,000. We’ve discussed it and we took this to the coalition, and it’s been non stop looking at every option we have.”

A remaining ‘gap’ of £1.7 m was stated, with how that would be resolved ‘still to be identified’.

Wrexham.com quizzed him on the maths, with the previous 12.5% figure that was based on officers advice, now 9.9% outcome decision from the coalition meaning a 2.6% gap – multiplied by the stated £600,000 meant there could be roughly £1.5m of cuts since the previous briefing, or the £1.7m unidentified gap as stated.

Cllr Pritchard replied, “I’m going to use the word ‘assumption’, an assumption that the council tax needed to be set at 12.5%. That assumption came from the officers. We decide on the council tax setting, not officers. They have a duty to make sure the council budget is correct and sign it off. If we couldn’t find the remaining savings the budget would not be signed off. We are very confident we will find the money”.

With the very tight timelines involved we as if he would rule out using reserves to plug the gap, and Cllr Pritchard said “We will not use reserves, that money will have to be found.”

Relating a conversation with one councillor, who had told us they did not like council tax in the double figures, we asked for assurance that the administration was setting the council tax based off financial assessments and reasoning rather than the aesthetics of a numeral as it was just under double figures and the quick rush to find £1.7m had not been created by councillors unhappy with a double digit rise.

Cllr Pritchard rejected that, “That has not been discussed. That has never come into the equation, what we’ve tried to do is to bring the council tax down as low as we can to continue to deliver services and make this council sustainable.”

Speaking more widely about the impact of council budgets elsewhere in Wales he said, “Across Wales, there will be redundancies and cuts. We will have to lose staff. There’s no ifs or buts here. That’s where we are.

Citing figures from a recent meeting with unnamed union representatives he said, “The unions believe across the 22 local authorities in Wales, there’ll be a redundancy of around about 13,000 employees across the 22. Now, if there was a company in Wales, say manufacturing, and they were going to lose 6000 jobs, I think the Welsh Government would probably intervene and put some money in to try and keep it – like they’ve done with the steelworks.

We asked off those figures what the impact locally would be, but there was a reluctancy to place a number locally.

Wrexham Council Chief Executive set the scene of work that has started and will progress to likely see Wrexham Council emerge as a small more nimble organisation in light of the cuts, “The change piece of work that we’ll need to do over the next two years will look at what is our organisationals design for the future. We will start in light of the further £28 million reduction over the next two years.

“What is the design of the organisation that we need to sustain service delivery in key statutory services? That is education, social care, and also in council priority areas. Clearly, we can’t just go on cutting. We actually have to redesign the organisation.”

We asked if this was the expected future why money was not being used now to ‘pump prime’ external entities to take over the running of services, much like Plas Madoc has successfully taken over a failing council run centre and turned it around.

Mr Bancroft replied, “We have to be very, very mindful of the impacts of cuts that we make. From a legislative point of view, we have to go through detailed equality impact assessments – and we are just upgrading those actually to be integrated impact assessments – we’re piloting that in social care.

“We consider all the impacts across people. The reason that’s important is we’re still in a cost of living scenario where residents out there are feeling the impact of not just the amount of money in their pockets, but also of reductions in services. So anything that we do, we have to be mindful of the cumulative effects of things – two or three things affecting an older person or a child.

“The figure that you’ve seen is quite a significant figure in terms of current savings that we’re making next year, to then take further, that is going to require a lot of thinking about how we do that to minimise the impact on residents, and minimising impacts on our statutory requirements.”

Deputy Leader Councillor David A Bithell was a bit more upbeat, “Even though the budget is tight next year and every department is going to be really tight with their budgets, we’re still maintaining all our services. wWe haven’t closed a library, we put an additional million pound into roads, we’re still putting additional money into bus services, we’re still trying to operate as people expect us to do as a city.

“However, the executive board set up a Change and Efficiency Board and we’ve been meeting weekly and we got to where we are now through the efficiency element. The next step is the biggest element, change. It is how we change and redesign council services. We will have to change how we operate as a council to make to meet the next two years.”

Cllr Bithell pointed to a £300k saving in the budget documents, which was due to fund a refurb of the Guildhall, that is no longer happening.

Wrexham.com pointed to regular reader feedback on budget articles, including ones about councillor pay rises and number of senior roles. We have historically documented here, and in Flintshire, about the ‘noting’ of such pay rise reports and pointed out that councillors can’t abstain or walk out of meetings if they dont like reports to not participate in votes. We contrasted that to the recent Local Development Plan vote, and asked if that would be a course of action for pay rise reports.

Cllr Pritchard said he was going to enquire what the position was on pay reports, with his belief it was a ‘courtesy’ to note the report via a vote. Wrexham.com did speculate a vote against noting a pay report could be illegal.

Cllr Pritchard would not be drawn into LDP vote comparisons, stating, “When we come back to this old chestnut, every elected members pay, whether you’re an executive board member, whether you’re a chair of scrutiny, licensing planning, or members of the opposition. There’s a payment and a fee. We don’t we don’t set that the Independent Renumeration Panel does.

“Every elected member has an individual choice. They can give that money away. They can give some of it to charity and I know some members do. I know some members give contributions to other local organisations, that is in their gift. Some elected members are financially more secure than others and some members rely on that income. That is where we are with it.”

The documents before the Executive Board show the budget position for the coming year plus a view to the future – which assumptions of a 6% rise in council tax built in, and low settlements from Welsh Government.

A run down of where the majority of the savings / cuts have been found so far is also included:

The proposed council tax increase will be discussed by Wrexham’s executive board at a meeting on Tuesday.

A final decision will be made at a full council meeting being held at the end of the month.