On the 30th October 2024, Rachel Reeves announced as part of the Autumn budget, changes to the Employers National Insurance contributions and the National Minimum Wage from April 2025. My first question to our Wokingham Borough Council’s officers was, how is this going to affect us? The answer was that we will have to directly find an additional £1.5M, next year in order to cover our wages bill.
However, there are also a number of contractors that we use to provide services for our residents, in particular, the Adult Social Care providers looking after our elderly, disabled and vulnerable residents. It took a little while longer to collect the information, but as a result of the Autumn budget, we expect our Adult Social Care costs to go up by over £3.5M because of the rise in the costs of paying their staff.
Initially, I was hopeful that our residents would receive the money given in NI back from Central Government to the council in the form of grants. I totally understand that the new government might want to make some readjustments in wealth distribution, taking money from those that have it and redistributing more to those who really need it. We all want our public services to be there for us, when we need it.
Just before Christmas we received news of our Local Government Grant, which includes the funding from Central Government for Wokingham Borough Council next year. Disappointingly, it was actually £1M less than last year with no recognition of the £5M taken from us by the Autumn budget statement.
Councils have been pushed to the limit in recent years, particularly with the austerity measures of the previous government. Seeking out savings and efficiencies are made as a matter of routine and Wokingham Borough Council is considered to be one of the most efficient Councils in the Country. However, there is only so much water that you can wring out of a towel and all of this squeezing cannot go on without significant changes and impacting services across the board.
Two thirds of your Council Tax funding goes on supporting our vulnerable adults and children alone and nearly 70% in total is spent on statutory services that we legally must do. This leaves only 30% for cutting grass, updating roads, maintaining parks, leisure centres and libraries etc. Despite promises from the current government of additional grants, it is unlikely to amount to the £6M that is now missing from Wokingham Borough Council’s budget next year. We have to put those in the most need first. This essentially means that the new Labour Government’s budget changes are taking money directly from the support for our most vulnerable residents in what looks like a reverse Robim Hood move and we will have to cut funding from other areas to compensate.
This, of course, is not just a Wokingham Borough Council problem – all councils and all public services are being asked to do more, with less, in real terms. Wokingham gets penalised more than most, because our residents are considered to be wealthy, but this does not mean our costs are less and we cannot sufficiently adjust our own taxes just to meet our residents real needs. I cannot see how without investing more money into local government that Labour can deliver on their promises of better education, public transport and the NHS as all of these services are also dependent on local councils for providing different parts of those services.
Cllr Imogen Shepherd-DuBey
