Sowerby Bridge News

CMBC Budget Plans Unveiled

Calderdale Council’s Cabinet has unveiled its proposed Budget for 2011/12 to 2013/14. Full details of the budget plans are contained in Cabinet’s proposals for consultation as agreed at their meeting last night.

These proposals are now subject to a public consultation process before they are finally discussed at a full meeting of Budget Council on February 28th.

Following last night’s Cabinet meeting, Calderdale Council’s Leader, Cllr Janet Battye, said: “We know that, as a Council, we are facing hard and challenging times – we have to plan to make savings of £65m in total over the next 3 years.

“As a new Cabinet in a new climate facing this challenge, we wanted to make certain that this was an open process, so we set up two big pieces of work over the last six months – we conducted a public consultation exercise to get local people’s views about what’s important to them (and we were pleased to get 11,000 responses from 3,000 people) and we ran cross-party Budget Review groups examining in considerable detail how the Council spends its money.

“Once we knew the details of what the Council is facing over the next three years in terms of money allocated to us by the Government, as a Cabinet, we worked through all of these proposals and this work has resulted in the proposals which we are now publishing for consultation.

The Council’s priorities focus on:

• Reducing waste within the Council, improving efficiency;
• Flattening the Management structure;
• Streamlining services and encouraging cross-Council working; and
• Investigating where services can be shared between Councils and other public bodies.

Calderdale Council’s Deputy Leader, Cllr Tim Swift, said: “Our highest priority is to maintain direct services to local people, and especially to vulnerable local people, and we are proposing to put about £1.5m extra into this – for older and disabled people, for vulnerable children and young people, and into neighbourhood services.

“We are also proposing that there should be no increase in Council tax next year, nor any pay increase for staff.

“We want to make sure that we find out the views of local people on these proposals so we are holding meetings with staff, the public and various interest groups such as businesses, Town and Parish Councils and local community groups, as well as examining the proposals in detail in the Council’s Scrutiny Panels.”

Cllr Battye added: As we did with the public consultation exercise, we will be collecting, collating and analysing these responses to inform our final proposals which will be agreed at a further Cabinet meeting on Monday February 14th, again, at 4pm, before going forward to the Council’s Annual Budget Council on Monday February 28th.”

The Cabinet Budget proposals report is now available on the website www.calderdale.gov.uk and consultation on the budget proposals will run for four weeks – ending on Monday 14th February 2011.

To comment on the budget proposals, people can:

• Complete the feedback form and email it to: budget@calderdale.gov.uk or post to Councillor Janet Battye, Leader, Calderdale Council, Town Hall, Halifax HX1 1UJ
• Attend a public meeting on: Monday 24th January: 2pm at St Paul’s Church, Sowerby Bridge or Tuesday 25th January: 6pm at North Bridge Leisure Centre, Halifax