Council tax hike and £17m budget cuts approved

Northumberland County Council agreed to impose the maximum council tax hike allowed by the Government.

The cost of car parking in some popular areas and rent bills for council house tenants is also set to jump this year, but leaders insisted that cutbacks elsewhere would not hit frontline services.

Residents will see their council tax increase by 2.99% in addition to a 2% rise in a precept to meet the rising costs of social care services.

The rise means that a band D property would see its bills go up by £87.91 to £1,985.30 a year, representing an overall 4.63% increase.

However, there was a reprieve as the council also voted to spend £2.1m to fund a discount of £17.21 that will be applied automatically to the bills of almost 125,000 households not already in receipt of council tax support.

Conservative council leader Glen Sanderson said the council tax changes were “pretty good going” at a time of double-digit inflation that has left the authority grappling with vastly increased costs.

He said: “We aren’t cutting any frontline services, it is a difficult decision but that is what we have decided to do.

“We are keeping on with our programme of building new schools and have three in the pipeline, we are building a new swimming pool [in Morpeth] when other councils are finding it difficult to keep theirs open.”

He also defended the authority’s decision to set aside £9m over the next three years to conduct a review of its operations that it is hoped will result in savings of £17m-a-year ‘in perpetuity’.

Coun Sanderson said: “I don’t think that we can say to people that we are going to cut public services without having done a proper stock take of what we are doing here. It is the right thing to do to have a truly tough review of how we do things.”

Under the 2023/24 budget plans, charges at coastal car parks are set to increase and so is the cost of residents’ parking permits.

Other savings include cutting the opening hours at recycling centres in Morpeth and Prudhoe, while council house tenants are facing a 7% hike in their rent payments.

Labour opposition leader Scott Dickinson said: “However you try to present them [the budget proposals], you are asking people to pay more and get less.”

A £4.93m saving will be made from adult social care and commissioning services, with £3m of that coming from a review of individual care packages.

Also facing hefty cuts are the council’s finance (£2.33 million), planning (£3.22 million) and directorate/corporate services (£4.398 million) departments.

Lib Dem group leader Jeff Reid claimed that the Tory-run council was “being dictated to by a bankrupt, right wing nutcase government” in putting up council tax by the maximum amount allowed by Chancellor Jeremy Hunt.

He added: “Adult social care is the crisis that is going to engulf us all and the only thing the government can think of is to let councils put the council tax up again. We need a national solution to this, we need national taxation to solve this problem because it is not going away.”