Protecting services as budget is set for coming year

Hello everyone. You may know by now that the council met last night to set its budget for 2025/26 and the level of Council Tax.

If I could sum it up in one sentence, I would say that while our financial position is better than we first feared, we are by no means out of the woods.

Our challenge this year has been to protect public services as much as we can while still managing to balance the books.

We had been expecting to have a financial gap of £19.5m for the next financial year, but this has been reduced to £5.8m.

This is because we received an extra £6 million from the Government this year, and a number of other external grants. We have also made a wide range of savings, through changes to our contracting arrangements, income generation and staffing efficiencies. We have been forced to use reserves to plug the remaining gap.

However, the underlying problem has not gone away. Bury still receives far less than other councils of our size, and we are having to cope with ever increasing demand for services – particularly in social care, as our population gets older.

Without a fundamental review of the way local government is financed, we will continue to face huge budget pressures year on year. We will continue to lobby the Government to change the system so that Bury gets a fairer deal.

Last night, councillors also agreed to increase the Council Tax by 2.99% for general council services, plus 2% reserved specifically for adult social care.

Adult social care is the biggest single item of our expenditure, taking up £82 million (35%) of the council’s budget. This is followed by children’s social care, which accounts for £65 million (27%).

After that, the three highest specific areas of spend are bins/waste/recycling at nearly £19 million (8%), the transport levy (£12m, or 5%), and public health (£11m, or 5%).

Despite our financial challenges, we are still carrying out the daily tasks that people expect of us – caring for our elderly and vulnerable, improving opportunities for our young people, emptying the bins and spending £30 million improving our roads.

And we are looking to the future too, as residents can see with all the regeneration work going on to transform our town centres.

We cannot turn round a decade of austerity in one year, but we are doing everything we can to put Bury on the right course.