Money Matters: Have your say on Buckinghamshire Council's spending priorities for 2024 to 2025

Overview

We want to know which services you think should be the main priorities in our budget for next year, and what you think about our plans for how next year's budget should be spent.

In recent years, financial pressures have had a huge impact on families, businesses and organisations.

Councils can’t escape these impacts and are facing sharply rising costs at the same time as more and more people are finding themselves in need of support.

Continuing to provide our main services such as waste collection, planning and road maintenance whilst also supporting our local children and adults in need is challenging.

To ensure we can continue to help the most vulnerable, we are having to make difficult decisions around money and how we provide our services going forward.

Countrywide, councils are facing huge financial challenges. You may have seen in the news that a number of councils have stated that they cannot meet their costs.

In comparison, we remain in a relatively stable position. This is in large part because, since becoming a unitary in 2020, we have worked hard to become ever more efficient and reduce running costs.

So far, we have delivered £45m additional savings and income, with a further £43.9m of savings and income proposed by the end of 2025. That’s a total £89m of savings and income over our first five years as a council – equivalent to 18% of our net budget for 2023 to 2024.

However, we are also experiencing the impact of rising costs and rising demand and need to take difficult decisions as we plan for the future in order to be sure that we continue to remain financially balanced.

Now we are looking for your feedback.

We are working up plans for the council’s 2024 to 2025 budget and we need you to tell us how you think we should be spending your money.

In considering your response, please do take time to reflect on the wider needs of the whole of Buckinghamshire in addition to the specific priorities for yourself, your family, your immediate community, your business or your organisation.

How the council is funded

We provide more than 700 different services in total and our budget sets out how much we will need to spend on these services and where that money will come from.

The money we receive from council tax covers 81% of the cost of providing all of these services – from paying for care packages for adults who need it, to providing emergency accommodation for homeless people and vulnerable children, as well as the essential services everyone relies on like bin collections, road repairs and keeping streets and open spaces clean and safe.

The other 19% of the council's budget is funded by money from Business Rates (13%), the New Homes Bonus (1%) and other un-ringfenced grants (5%).

It’s also important to note that the funding for the running of our schools is not set or controlled by the council. We distribute this to schools on behalf of government as part of the Dedicated Schools Grant.

How your money is spent

All councils have a legal duty to limit their spending to the income they receive each year. In other words, our budget must balance.

Most of our budget each year needs to be spent on the services we are required by law to provide, such as social care for adults and children. This is known as ‘statutory’ spend.

The spending breakdown for the year 2023 to 2024 (net) is:

• Adult Social Care – £184,669,000
• Children's Social Care – £87,892,000
• Roads and Transportation – £61,785,000
• Costs of running the council – £52,094,000
• Education (excluding Dedicated Schools Grant) – £15,075,000
• Waste and Recycling – £12,887,000
• Customer Services – £11,337,000
• Housing and Homelessness – £6,651,000
• Planning – £6,096,000
• Culture and Leisure – £4,623,000
• Regulatory Services – £3,148,000
• Street Cleaning – £2,689,000
• Community Boards – £2,669,000
• Strategic Infrastructure, Town Centre Regeneration and Economic Growth – £2,593,000
• Community Safety – £1,974,000
• Environment – £1,386,000

This adds up to a total net spend of £457,571,000 for 2023 to 2024 (total takes account of rounding).

Net spend is expenditure minus the income we receive from customers and ringfenced grants.

We are proposing to allocate the 2024 to 2025 budget in a similar way.

How to have your say

You can tell us your views in one of the following ways:

• complete the online survey using the link at the end of the page
• complete, and return, a printed version of the survey (PDF 0.28MB)

If you have any questions about this activity, please email us at consultations@buckinghamshire.gov.uk.

Please tell us your views by midnight on Sunday 15 October 2023.

What happens next

We will consider all the feedback we receive and use the findings to help us develop the draft budget further.

A detailed draft budget will be published in late 2023 for further feedback and scrutiny. It will then be finalised and agreed in February 2024.

Privacy

We will use the information you provide here only for this activity. We will store the information securely in line with data protection laws and will not share or publish any personal details. For more information about data and privacy, please see our Privacy Policy.

If you have questions about data and privacy, please email us on dataprotection@buckinghamshire.gov.uk. Or write to our Data Protection Officer at Buckinghamshire Council, The Gateway, Gatehouse Road, Aylesbury, HP19 8FF.