Miles Parkinson

I HOPE you’ve had a good Christmas, whether yours was a hectic one or a time for some much needed rest to recharge the batteries for the year ahead.

We’ve had a busy traditional family Christmas, my wife Bernadette and I are blessed with grandchildren now so it’s been wonderful to be part of the magic that little ones bring to the season.

Christmas, with all its extra expenses, can be a difficult time for families struggling to balance the household budget and, as we’re now in the budget setting process, it’s the same for the Council as we struggle to balance the books, whilst facing massive cuts from our central government funding.

We haven’t increased Council Tax since 2009/10.

But we’re now facing huge reductions in our Government funding, at a time when we are also facing increased demand for the services we provide, as more people need the Council’s help in difficult times and costs keep on rising through inflationary pressures.

We therefore have to work hard constantly to improve our value for money and produce more and more savings to cope with the ever increasing financial pressures we face.

Our Government funding is set to reduce drastically at a crucial time when our waste and recycling service needs some much needed investment, to make recycling easier for you and to maintain effective recycling levels in the Borough.

Raising Council Tax by £5 for a Band D property, which is less than 10p a week, will allow us to manage the impact of the Government cuts to our funding and to replace the current white sack and blue box system with two new wheelie bins for each household instead in 2018.

This means that we will all be able to recycle much more efficiently and our streets will be cleaner, as the rubbish that sometimes drops from the boxes and the sacks on collection day will be contained within the wheelie bins, which are much easier to handle.

We also plan to allow garden waste to be deposited in the normal household waste bin by the summer of 2017 for those that wish to do that and offer a fee based service for those who wish to continue to recycle their garden waste.

Looking forward, our funding will be cut even more over the next few years, as the Government removes more and more of the support they provide to help people locally and the prospects are that by 2020 we won’t get any help from Government at all.

Despite this, we remain committed to improving the Borough, protecting front-line services wherever we can and delivering improved value for money throughout all Council services, whilst doing our utmost to keep Council Tax as low as possible in the challenging years to come.