Council tax payers in Bury face a five per cent increase in bills if budget proposals are passed this week. Bury Council meet on Wednesday to agree their budget for 2023/24 with the authority also needing to implement £14M of cuts including more than 30 job losses to balance the books.
Budget papers published ahead of the meeting say the basic element of council tax is set to rise by 2.99 per cent, the maximum allowed. On top of that there will be a further two per cent increase for the adult social care precept, ring fenced funding to help pay for services to the most vulnerable.
The Labour run council said the budget is brought forward in ‘an extremely difficult context’. They said the Covid pandemic has led to ‘increased costs, additional demand and reduced income’.
Other factors affecting their position were sharp increases in energy costs and ‘inflation at a 40 year feeding into higher costs of contracts, staff pay and utility bills’. They said national shortages of labour were also increasing workforce costs, particularly within services for children.
The report said the council was already facing a deficit of £4M at the end of the current financial year. The report set out the scale of cuts needed to balance the budget in 2023/24.
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It said: “The ongoing position is a gap of £31.395m, hence why savings programmes, efficiencies and additional income have been identified to close the full recurrent gap. “Savings proposals totalling £24.261m and additional council tax and business rates income of £7.134m have been brought forward to balance the budget.”
The council said and among the schemes to give savings were increases to fees and charges aligned to inflation, a commercialisation model for Bury Art Museum and a strategy to reduce the cost of high-cost social care placements in children’s services. In October, 2022 the council said a direct result of the budget reductions would around 75 redundancies across departments.
However, this week’s paper said that figure had been reduced.
The report, said: “The potential number of redundancies across departments as a direct result of the delivery of the budget reductions has reduced from 75 to 36 as a result of the detailed design work on budget proposals and strict vacancy management over the last three months.
“The council remains committed to further reducing this number and avoiding compulsory redundancies wherever possible.” At the meeting on Wednesday the budget will be debated and opposition groups will have the chance to put forward changes to be voted on.
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