Conwy Council could increase council tax by 10% while making service cuts!

Why not a cull at the top? The Director and McCoubrey (who is useless) need to go and cut all the managers in the authority, there are far too many of them. Sell them skip at Porth Eirias and Bodlondeb!

CONWY could increase council tax by 10% to tackle a £21m shortfall while cutting services by 10% across the board.

The council now faces a resource shortfall of £21,528,000 for the next financial year, but Conwy’s cabinet member for finance has promised to do everything to keep council tax down.

This shortfall is not helped by the annual Welsh Government settlement increase coming in at 7.3%, which is under the national average of 7.9%. Already the authority has asked each of its services to reduce budgets by 10%.

Conwy will, though, “protect” its education and social services departments with 5% cuts after both departments resisted a request to slash budgets by 10%.

Cllr Mike Priestley, the cabinet member for finance, vowed to keep council tax as low as possible. “I’m doing my best to get council tax under 10%,” he said.

“Everyone in Conwy is doing their best to get council tax down. 10% and under, that’s what I’m working on.”

Last year, council tax in Conwy increased by 3.95%. This week, councillors on the finances and resources scrutiny committee requested more information on how £3.3m of proposed cuts to education would be dealt with by each of Conwy’s 55 schools, fearing the impact on children.

Teacher and teaching assistant redundancies were even mentioned at the scrutiny committee meeting whilst another councillor suggested the council should cut one of its cabinet member positions. The financial report was also accepted and agreed by the council’s cabinet this week and is set to be revised before it returns to the democratic process in four weeks.

In the latest version of the report, Conwy’s finance officers have modelled several separate scenarios, including council tax rises of 10%, 12.5%, and even 15%. This would bring in an additional £6.24m, £7.78m, or £9.33m respectively.

But even a 10% council tax rise would leave the council with a £3.7m shortfall, with service cuts, and this figure would reduce to £2.17m with a 12.5% rise. The authority would still be short of £623,000 even if they upped council tax by a massive 15%.

A 10% council tax rise would equate to an extra £143.82 a year for a band D property. This figure would shoot up to £179.77 for band D property for a 12.5% rise and £215.72 with a 15% increase.

Cllr Priestley also explained that the North Wales Fire Authority had insisted on an increase of 9.9%, equivalent to a 1% council tax rise alone. This compares to North Wales Police’s precept of 5.14%.

The council will now desperately try to recover more of the shortfall before a final council tax report will go before councillors ahead of the new financial year. Speaking after this week’s cabinet meeting, Cllr Priestley said: “We’ve still got four weeks where we are going to work tirelessly to close the gap on our shortfall and try to reduce the increase in council tax.

“If some residents are struggling, they may be in a position where they are paying their council tax over 10 months, and they may want to stretch it to 12 months to reduce their outgoings. I understand people are struggling, but I have to do my best to protect the services that will help those who are struggling.

“It’s the worst financial situation I’ve ever seen, and I’ve been a councillor since 2004. It’s particularly bad for Conwy because we have some of the lowest reserves in Wales. So we haven’t got the luxury of plugging the money out of our reserves. We haven’t got that money.

“A lot of authorities have some very healthy reserves and balances, and they would be able to use them to plug some gaps. At Conwy, we do not. We have some of the lowest reserves in Wales. It’s not helped by poor settlements, but it has not helped that predominantly we have had low council tax.

“In the past, the council has not increased council tax to where possibly it could. For example, Gwynedd next door to us is £88 more a year for band D, and in Denbighshire, it is £41. Now you times that by the number of households, and you’ll see it is a lot of money.”

Cllr Priestley added that the 7.3% annual settlement increase from Welsh Government had been taken up by pay increases, such as the Real Living Wage increases for council health care workers. He added: “The increase we got from Welsh Government this year was swallowed up by our pay bill. So Welsh Government could say Conwy got £15m, but that went out on pay.”

From...https://www.northwalespioneer.co.uk/news/23280676.conwy-increase-council-tax-10-making-service-cuts/

@ConwyCBC