Council tax hike aims to plug £5.1m shortfall

CHILDREN could have to stump up more for school dinners in Halton as the council battles to get its finances under control

Paper clips, fireworks and children’s centres are also in the firing line in Halton, which needs to make £4.2m in savings next year if it is to balance its budget, even after increasing council tax by the maximum amount allowed.

Residents are facing a 3.99% hike in council tax from April, which would see most Halton residents pay around £50 more per year. But the council is still in dire financial straits, with a predicted budget hole of £5.1m this year forcing it to halt all nonessential spending and look for further cuts next year.

In proposals to be discussed by the council’s executive board, the local authority has suggested a number of ways to either cut spending or boost income.

The council will ask children and their parents to pay more for snacks and unhealthy school food, which it hopes will raise £125,000.

There will also be a 200% premium on council tax for the 51 properties in the borough that have been empty for more than five years and a single £35 annual charge for collection of green waste, as opposed to £32 when paying online or £37 when paying in person.

Among the cuts being considered, the council is proposing to save:

£200,000 by cutting the budget for community and children’s centres; £50,000 by asking staff to supply their own stationery; £226,000 by not taking minutes at some meetings, allowing it to lay off nine full-time employees; £40,000 by replacing plastic water bottles with reusable ones in schools; £48,000 by finding ‘alternative funding’ for the borough’s fireworks display.

These plans will need to be approved by the executive board and then signed off at a Full Council meeting in March, but given Labour’s dominance of the council they are unlikely to change significantly.

Even with these savings, the council expects to make yet more cuts over the next three years.

As well as a £5.1m overspend forecast for this year – mainly a result of rising expenditure on children’s services and adult social care – the council expects a budget gap of £7.9m next year.

This is forecast to be followed by a £15m shortfall in 2021-22 and a £4.4m gap the year after that.

With the council’s reserves sitting at just £5m, its ability to cover any overspend is extremely limited.

In November, the council’s chief finance officer Ed Dawson described the authority’s situation as ‘scary’.

In the same month, executive member for resources Cllr Mike Wharton said the council’s spiralling finances were ‘clearly the inevitable consequence of the huge cuts in Government funding which Halton has suffered since 2010, at a time when demand for social care services in particular continues to rise’.

Over the past decade, the council has seen its budget fall by nearly a fifth – almost double the national average.