KCC's Cabinet, of which I am a member, will tomorrow consider the budget proposals for 2014-15. If approved, these proposals will then go to the meeting of the full County Council on 13 February.
The budget will be set under conditions of continuing austerity, which are unlikely to lift for some years. KCC has had to deliver savings of £269 million over the last three years, i.e. around £90 million per year on an annual net budget of a little over £900 million. We will need to make savings on a similar scale over the next three years, and grants from central government are likely to go on reducing until the end of the decade.
The bulk of this will be met through reductions in expenditures; back in the autumn, KCC set out in the autumn its plans for transformation of the authority's activities, through a focus on prevention rather than services that simply react to problems, enhanced productivity and the very best practice for procuring services.
However, after three years of council tax freezes, we are also proposing a modest increase (1.99%) in council tax. This is not something that we undertake lightly; however, a tax increase on this scale yields £10 million in extra revenue and so makes a useful contribution to closing the budget gap while protecting services to the greatest possible extent. From the autumn we undertook a public consultation that generated much higher response rates than in the past, and while a significant portion of opinion (around a quarter of respondents) was opposed to any increase, some 71% supported some level of tax increase to protect front line services.
You can find the Cabinet papers, including the Budget Book and medium Term Financial plan, here.
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