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On February 24, Babergh councillors met and agreed both their share (about 10% of the total) of the 2009/10 Council Tax and the Budget for that year.
As part of Babergh's ongoing commitment to making Council information as accessible as possible, we have produced two audio interviews with Cllr. Nick Ridley, Chairman of Babergh's Strategy Committee. One is titled - Budget and Council Tax Overview - and lasts about three minutes whilst the other - Budget and Council Tax Detail - lasts for about eight minutes.
Please click on each link to hear each interview:
 Budget and Council Tax Overview (MP3)
Budget and Council Tax Detail (MP3)
Theme Approx timing (mins, secs)
Seven pence per week increase 2, 25
Tough decisions for future 3, 13
Service priority spending 4, 17
External funding 5, 37
Local Government Reorganisation 7, 00
Transcript of the audio versions
Budget and council tax overview
Reporter: This is the 6th time that Babergh has kept its Council Tax below the rate of inflation and means that Babergh residents are paying just £2.60 per week for all the services provided by the District Council. Like many others, the Council’s been hit by a huge drop in income over recent months. The economic downturn has cost in the region of £700,000 or 6% of it’s income largely from investments, planning and related areas. Councillor Nick Ridley, Chairman of the Strategy Committee, says the low tax increase has been achieved in challenging circumstances through good housekeeping, like the saving of £400,000 this year, but it has been possible to prioritise spending areas for next.
Nick Ridley: We’ve had to deploy a little bit of our reserve monies into the Budget, but at the end of all of this we are still able to identify £140,000 of new spending that we will be able do next year, that is going to cover the free swimming for the over 60’s and the under 16’s, which is a government initiative, but nevertheless as with a lot of these initiatives is not fully funded so is costing us about £30,000. Affordable housing is an issue which we still need to keep going although quite clearly with the developers in some difficulties at the moment it is not going to be an easy programme to deliver, but we are particularly looking to give additional grants to voluntary and other organisations and especially the CAB who provide outreach surgeries for debt advice throughout Babergh, which at this particular moment we need to support both the voluntary sector and the those people who do need that sort of advice.
Reporter: You have obviously got to have Capital Expenditure projects, and you’ve got those, of around about £6½M, now where’s that money going to come from?
Nick Ridley: Well only a part of that I am afraid is being funded at the moment, in fact only about £2M worth. We are a small Council, we have various parts of the Capital Programme which we are expecting some capital receipts for but we’ve also managed to bring in some external funding of about £3M which is over the next couple of years and particularly from Haven Gateway of about £1.3M within that £3M. So we are able to use that for particular things like the Hadleigh community facilities, the joint Waste Depot with Mid Suffolk District Council and also Pin Mill, we’ll be able to do the rest we hope of clearing up the foreshore which is something we have been trying to do over the last 3 or 4 years. So we are being positive in terms of supporting the local economy, supporting local people in difficult times, not in any way being extravagant but equally being positive.
Budget and council tax detail
Nick Ridley: I think it probably has, and it of course has not been helped because in the last 3 or 4 months we’ve had the national economy plunging from one thing to another so that the expectations that we’d thought we had got in the middle of the year as to how things would turn out, what sort of savings we could expect, what sort of income we could expect to get, those have totally changed. So although we are not a rich council we do have a fair amount of money to invest, what can one get in investments now and of course that is going to be a situation which is going to hit all councils throughout this next year. So its been very tricky, I think, the last 4 or 5 months to get to the situation we have with the budget. I think we’ve got a very positive budget outcome and I think that from the point of view of the council tax payers I think we are giving them a good deal at 2.9% and that is going to leave us as the second smallest of the council taxes within the county so if you take our Band D we are talking about 7p a week or thereabouts on Band D, and that I think is a good result at 2.9% against the inflation figures which are roughly 3%, but there is a little problem in terms of council housing, in as much as those rent levels are in fact fixed by Government and there is an average rent increase expected this year of 6.7% and a thought that a similar sort of amount is going to go forward next year. Now although pensions are going up by 5%, 6.7% is very unsatisfactory and I think all local authorities are very unhappy about that. Also the business rates where again we don’t have control of the situation we are looking at a plus of something like 5%. Business rates of course don’t just go into our pocket, they actually we collect them on behalf of Government, we get a very little bit of that back. So we are very pleased I think with the overall situation but I have to say we are rather unhappy on behalf of our council house tenants.
Reporter: Well if you look at it as 7p extra per week, how have you achieved that?
Nick Ridley: Well we’ve achieved that by identifying very substantial savings, £400,000, in the course of the last year and also looking to see how we can deploy what reserves we have because we have some modest reserves and we have been able to deploy some of those into producing the figures that we’ve got. But we are getting to the point with the reserves particularly where we are getting towards the line that we want to say no more because we are not a rich council, our agreement is that with members we should not take our reserves below £1.2M and we are at about £1.5/£1.6M after this particular round.
Reporter: But next year you are going to be faced with some very difficult decisions aren’t you because you can’t retain your reserves at that level?
Nick Ridley: Absolutely, and at the most we have probably got £100,000 to deploy of reserves which is obviously very different from £600,000 this year. We are going to probably have to look for savings approaching £1M and we have never in my time on the council had to identify savings of that sort of size and it is difficult to see where the optimistic points are going to come in, ie. I don’t see the economy recovering, I don’t see interest rates going up that much, I don’t see the building business in terms of what we get in terms of development costs and charges, I don’t see those taking off again because I think we’ve got to say that like everybody else in the country we are having to batten down the hatches for the next couple of years.
Reporter: Yes, you’ve got to batten down the hatches but at the same time you’ve also got to spend money to provide services, haven’t you?
Nick Ridley: Absolutely, and in this next year we are aiming to spend £140,000 on a number of services that we particularly think need supporting. We are looking at the local community, we are looking at the CAB who help those people who have got problems, we are looking at free swimming.
Reporter: You have no choice with free swimming, do you? That is a government initiative.
Nick Ridley: Well yes, we do have a choice, and in fact some of the councils have taken the view that it is too large a charge and they are not going to offer free swimming for the under 16s and for the over 65s. So I think Ipswich Borough for one is not going to do that. But we took the view that we should and we are going to do it, but it is going to cost us about £30,000. Affordable housing clearly very important, additional grants to voluntary and other organisations I’ve already mentioned. Homelessness accommodation for young people we have to look at and in terms of what people expect us to do and make sure that we do attack where necessary anti-social behaviour and we are looking at drugs and alcohol misuse, particularly looking in the hot spots which is really those connected with what is commonly called the “night economy” ie. the night club trade, the pub trade which is mostly in Sudbury and a little bit in Hadleigh.
Reporter: Isn’t there a determination on the part of the Council or on your part certainly to, as you put it, lever in external funds of around £2M as well?
Nick Ridley: Well that’s absolutely right and that’s money that we are having in from Haven Gateway in particular and that does give us a little bit more leeway but we’ve got a capital programme of about £6½M and at the moment there is only about £2M of that which is actually funded so we are going to have to look at our capital programme as the year goes on to see what we really can afford to spend that money on.
Reporter: Has there been a further complication this year, and possibly next year as well, in that the long awaited Local Government Review, is still a long awaited Government Review?
Nick Ridley: Now because the timetable has been set back to the middle of July it causes further uncertainties because if it had been decided by the Secretary of State that there was to be unitary governance in Suffolk, and we’re very much in support of that, it really would have meant that this would have been the last budget that we personally were doing. As it is we are almost now certainly seeing the same things slip through to 2011, assuming it happens at all and that creates a lot of uncertainties because I think we, all of us, firmly of the opinion that 8 local councils in Suffolk for the longer term is not really practical. The savings that we are all expected to produce year on year make it almost impossible for us to do the jobs we want to do.
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