Budget Challenge 2024/25 - Tell Us More

The Council is in the second phase of planning for setting this 2024-25 budget. We now know that we are facing a £113m budget gap over the next three years, and within that there is a need to find savings of £57m. We need to find a combination of savings and income generation to address this gap.

Between November and December 2023, we invited the public to have their say on our budget challenge. The public had the option of submitting a budget through our budget simulator or filling in a survey. We received around 2,500 responses to these. We also received around 200 suggestions from staff.

This helped us to understand what services are important to the public; where they think we can be more efficient; how much more they are prepared to pay for fees, charges and council tax and what services they think can be delivered differently, reduced or stopped.

We have considered the suggestions received from the public, staff and elected members and these are presented in the following Suggestion Pack which is organised by theme.

• Developing our operating model
• Redesigning our assets
• Being more efficient
• Generating income

This is supported by an introduction and context document, that provides background on the budget, some of the feedback we have received and what the next steps are.

We are now asking for you to tell us more on which suggestions are most important to you.

Tell us more by:

• Completing the survey questions for each of the themes – income generation, developing our operating model, redesigning assets, being more efficient.
• Ideas – if you have further suggestions please tell us.