County Treasurer's

A budget of tough choices in hard times

The services we provide have a direct impact on all our lives – from educating Hampshire’s children, caring for vulnerable adults, older people and children, ensuring the county’s roads are maintained for safe journeys to work and school, providing recreational facilities for young people, and managing waste. However the effect of year on year council tax increases, especially on older people and those on fixed incomes cannot be ignored. So setting the level of council tax will always be a question of balancing the provision of services with people’s ability to pay and listening to you – our residents.

Maintaining top-rated services

For the fourth year running our services have received top-marks from the Government’s inspectors who stated that we were improving. Yet this record will be a challenge to sustain long term.

Why? The County Council is dealing with the pressures of providing social care to a growing elderly population; more young people with complex disabilities who are dependent on our support; dealing with our ever growing rubbish, and the consequences of even more cars on the roads. The increased numbers and cost of all of this is rising faster than inflation.

Despite making efficiency and other savings of £10.6 million and having some limited success in persuading the Government to recognise these and other pressures on councils' budgets, this year’s effective grant increase was just 0.2% – far less than inflation. So we were faced with some difficult decisions. How to give you the services you need whilst keeping council tax increases low.

Listening to you

Over 3,000 council taxpayers on our Citizens' Panel were invited to respond to a recent postal consultation. We also held a budget consultation workshop in October 2005 with residents and gave all Hampshire residents the opportunity to have their say online. Most people did not support the council tax option requiring service cuts and were willing to accept a higher increase in order to protect ‘life or death’ services such as social care. We also need to modernise our services to provide both better care and value for money. After taking into account £10.6 million efficiency improvements this has been achieved with a council tax rise of 4.7% leaving the amount you pay in council tax still amongst the lowest for counties in England.

How your services are funded

Apart from the money that goes directly to schools, the Government grant we receive only covers 20% of the cost of all the other services we provide. This means 80% of the money needed to look after vulnerable people, the elderly, young people and maintaining our roads has to be raised by council tax.

The future

As previously reported in Hampshire Now, the Government is making yet more changes to the grant funding formula for councils. This could see yet more money being moved from local authorities in the South East, including Hampshire, to other parts of the country in coming years, but for now this has been deferred. The full effect of Hampshire’s potential grant loss of £38 million, or 30% of the current level of grant, will not occur until 2008/09. The County Council will continue to lobby ministers to try and prevent any changes that could result in the County Council and residents of Hampshire being worse off.

If you have any questions about the content of these pages please contact the County Treasurer's Department.