February is the time when we set our budget for the financial year ahead. In recent years it’s been quite a challenging process, as we have had to adjust to having less money given to us by the government as they try to get the national deficit under control. Over the last five years we’ve made cumulative savings of £9 million which, especially compared with our annual revenue budget of around £16 million, is a pretty significant amount.

At the same time as making savings, we’ve frozen the council tax for five years in a row, incentivised by government funding given for this purpose. We were also able to cut car parking charges a few years ago and we’ve held those reductions ever since.

Protecting the services that matter most
Although we’ve got less money to spend as a council, I don’t think the public have noticed a great deal of difference. Our approach has been to protect the services that matter most to people and reduce our “back office” costs. We’ve lost around a quarter of council staff – so many of our current officers have had to cope with a bigger workload and I’d like to thank them for their efforts. We’ve managed for the last year without a highly-paid Chief Executive, although we are soon to be recruiting for a new post jointly with the County Council.

We’re working ever more closely with our colleagues at the County Council, which I think people expect us to do. We’re joining up more of our services to bring greater resilience and reduced cost, and we’re doing the same with some other neighbouring councils – like sharing building control with Stroud and joining Cheltenham and Tewkesbury’s shared legal service.

Our partners, like Amey (who deliver services such as street cleaning and refuse collection) and Aspire (who run GL1 and the Oxstalls Sports Park) have had to share the burden of reduced funding as well.

If you have views on how we should spend your council tax money, please let me know before we finally agree the budget on 26th February.