County facing £51m shortfall in finances
10% COUNCIL TAX RISE WOULD BE NEEDED TO OFFSET PANDEMIC IMPACT
NOTTINGHAMSHIRE County Council has said a huge funding shortfall caused by the Covid pandemic means council tax would have to rise by about 10 percent from next year to keep pace and prevent non-essential services running.
A sharp increase in demand for services, unexpected costs like PPE and a decrease in income has caused huge pressure on council finances across the country.
Some funding has been given to councils from the Government, but even after this Conservative-led Nottinghamshire County Council is expecting a £51 million shortfall over the next three years.
It says it is continuing to make the case to the Government that more funding was needed, but that it was ‘unlikely’ all of its costs would be reimbursed.
At the start of the crisis, Chancellor Rishi Sunak said the Government would stand ‘shoulder to shoulder’ with councils.
But the council’s finance chief Richard Jackson says the council ‘will have to take its share of the burden.’
He said a council tax increase of 10 percent would be ‘unpalatable’ to the council, but also said job losses at the council was ‘the last thing we want.’
Further, Councillor Jackson said after 12 years of making savings, there ‘weren’t any areas of spending the council wanted to cut.’
He said local government reorganisation - essentially scrapping borough, district and the county councils and replacing them with one council to cover the whole of Notts excluding the city - would save up to £30 million a year.
Councillor Jackson represents Toton, Chilwell and Attenborough for the Conservatives, and is the chairman of the Finance and Major Contracts committee which will scrutinise the council’s financial position next Monday.
Speaking yesterday, he said: “The money that has been spent absolutely had to be spent.
“Whatever needed to be done to keep people safe was done, whatever needed to be spent was spent.
“The £26 million (shortfall this year) is a best estimate, but there are a lot of unknowns, for example school transport - schools will go back in September we don’t know what restrictions there will be with social distancing, will we have to put on twice as many buses for example?
“As we have made estimates in the last few months generally, they have only been revised upwards.”
Asked about the 10 percent rise in council tax, he said: “A 10 percent rise in council tax would be unacceptable to the public and to the council, certainly unpalatable to us, it’s certainly not our intention.
“It’s an indicative number so people can understand what the cost of this is to us.
“I think there are other ways we can plug the gap. Local Government Reorganisation (LGR) would bring about up to £30 million in savings per year.
“I think the Chancellor has talked about £190 billion as the cost to the Government of this crisis, to go back and ask for more money for local Government when they’ve put £8 billion in so far, I don’t think that’s going to be the answer either.
“I think we’ve got to look at how we organise ourselves.”
Asked whether he thought in the short term there were likely to be job losses at the council, Councillor Jackson said: “This is the last thing we want.
“We know we’ve seen a reduction over the last 12 years and we’ve seen how hard people have worked over this crisis period, and again it can be largely avoided if we can get LGR.” On the potential for service reductions should further Government funding and LGR not materialise, he said: “We have to balance a budget at the end of the day. There are things we have to do and things we do by choice. There are only so many places we can go to to save money, but again it’s absolutely the last thing we want to do.” “We’ll continue to work to persuade the Government that there is a need for funding. We work through the Local Government Association and the County Councils Network to demonstrate that. “We are working hard to do that but given the scale of the financial impact on the Government it’s unrealistic to expect (the shortfall) to be met entirely.”
The money that has been spent absolutely had to be spent.
Cllr Richard Jackson