Buckinghamshire authority confirms council tax bills to rise by maximum amount

Council tax bills in Buckinghamshire will rise by the maximum 4.99 per cent in April after the council approved its budget for the coming year.

Conservative-run Buckinghamshire Council plans to save nearly £170.7m by 2027 through cost-cutting and generating additional income.

The measures are contained in the authority’s medium term financial plan, which was approved by councillors at a full council meeting on Wednesday evening.

The meaty 130-page document sets out how the council is balancing its budget for the next three years.

The approved council tax hike includes an increase of 2.99 per cent in basic council tax and a 2 per cent increase for the adult social care precept.

For the average Band D council taxpayer, this represents an additional £1.69 per week in 2024/25.

The council tax rise comes amid an ‘extremely challenging’ time for the council’s financial position over the next three years.

The local authority, which performs 1,300 different statutory duties, faces huge pressures on its budget due to the increasing costs of and demands for the provision of four key services.

These services are adult social care, children’s services, home to school transport and temporary accommodation.

Council leader Martin Tett said that like local authorities up and down the country, the council was finding it ‘very difficult’ to balance its books.

Speaking about the ‘big four’ services, he said: “They are amazingly difficult areas to control the costs in. Nearly all of them involve statutory services that we are inspected on.

“Every time these areas grow, what is left in the budget gets squeezed. That is a massive problem for every council in the country that is providing these services.”

The council’s approved budget sets out how it will reduce its expenditure and increase income in order to balance its books.

One measure the authority is taking is investing in new children’s homes to reduce the use of high-cost external placements and increase in foster carers.

Councillor Tett told the budget meeting that three children’s homes are already ‘in the pipeline’, while another 10 are planned to help ‘reduce some of the pressure’ in this area.

Other cost-cutting measures include making savings in adult social care by providing help for some residents, where appropriate, to live more independently.

The council is also selling some of its office space, such as the King George V site in Amersham, which is closing.

Additional savings are set to come through greater council investment in more housing and temporary accommodation units to bring down the spend on costly nightly-paid accommodation.

Councillor Tett told the meeting that the council had received almost 2,000 responses on its public consultation on the budget and how money should be spent in Buckinghamshire.

He said: “We have recognised the continuing pressure on residents and business throughout the last year.”

The council leader revealed that previously planned cuts to litter collecting, gully clearing and weed spraying services and a reduction in the operating hours of recycling centres had been reinstated into the budget.

This is due to extra government funding that the council recently received for social care.

More detail about the budget is available online.