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24/02/08 : “Best Budget ever” increases Council Tax by just 1.9%
“I believe that this is the best budget I have presented to this Council,” Leader of the Council David Sutton told the Council’s budget meeting on 19 February, “and I am deeply proud both of the financial package that is before us this evening and (even more so) of the political commitments which stand behind it.”
He explained that this excellent budget for 2008-09 was the flow-through of the benefit of all the difficult decisions on costings and staffing levels announced in last year’s budget, adding that he was very pleased that the Audit Commission had recently confirmed Reading’s status as a three-star good council and upgraded its performance assessment to “improving well”
Cllr. Sutton said the good news in this budget included:
a Council Tax increase well below inflation, by any measure
continuation of high-level provision of services, a much wider range of services than those provided by our neighbours, or by most councils our size
continuing generous support for Reading’s voluntary and community sector, with a genuine inflation-linked increase
expanding and improving support for public transport in Reading, especially through the Borough’s own bus company
a sound and secure prudent budget to take forward into the future, with the Council’s balances raised to £4 million
an approach to social care for the elderly and vulnerable which was generous, maximising, better than other councils - funding social care provision across all three bands of eligibility criteria: moderate, substantial and critical.
This last, Cllr. Sutton, said “is a huge financial decision and one which fewer and fewer top-tier councils feel able to take. But it is a decision which is fundamental to what we stand for; it says everything about the sort of council Reading is.
“It is a decision which changes the lives of hundreds and hundreds of Reading’s most vulnerable citizens – and, of course, their families. Our calculation is that there are over 1700 recipients of social care packages here – I repeat, over 1700 – who would receive nothing at all if they were unfortunate enough to live in Tory Wokingham (or West Berkshire).
“When a resident says to me on the doorstep, ‘I think Labour’s best for us old folks’, and I hear that quite often, it warms my heart, of course it does, but I also know that we have worked really hard to earn that accolade.
This budget contains a number of clear political choices. It is Labour’s political choice to sustain the real value of grants to the voluntary and community sector, to fund social care fully, to put extra investment into waste management, and to spend more on libraries, on children’s centres and on the “safer and stronger communities” agenda.
These are our choices and we stand by them. And we are delivering them with an exceptionally low Council Tax increase. A 1.9% Council Tax increase at Band D is actually in Reading an average Council Tax increase of just 1.3%. That is real value-for-money budgeting.”
P.S. The Conservatives voted for the budget, but only because of the low increase in Council Tax, and made it clear that if they took control they would scrutinise every line and, refusing to make any commitments, that everything but everything would be up for grabs. Voters are advised to look at what has been happening in neighbouring Tory Councils like Wokingham and West Berkshire to see what that means.
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