It’s that time of year when cllrs have to start deciding on what are the priorities for the 25/26 financial year. Cllrs at North Yorkshire have had an initial meeting with heads of services to get a flavour of where they think they can make savings.
I say ‘think’ because alsorts can crop up and ruin plans, such as masses of snow, policy changes with the NHS putting more loading on the council, some major defect in a road (A19 floods and degradation of the road).
Just to give you a flavour of the sums involved:
- Children and Young Peoples services is a £100m budget with half going on ‘Home to School Transport’
- Selffunders in the Care System—they tend to go into care earlier but then run out of money. It is then the council who have to pay.
- Libraries. This is still a £4.4m budget and a restructure is being looked at
- The Summit in Selby is a significant drain on resources with little income
- They are looking to review the high cost packges of care and may bring ‘in house’ as some other councils have done—target to save£1.3m
- Transfer Transport responsibilities to the Combined Authority (Mayor!), that would save £1.1m but will almost certainly there will be ‘push back’!!!! on that one
- More energy savings on street lighting. Somehow they think they can save £2m
We shall see at future meetings as to how this unfoldss