Ben OsborneWith the BBC reporting last week that the City of York Council will have to make further cuts of £22 million in the next two years, on top of the already agreed cuts of £21 million that were agreed by the city’s councilors in February, it looks like tough times lay ahead for many.
The latest budget cuts will be discussed by the council on 6th December and the likely outcome is going to be that councilors will have to make some very tough, and inevitably, unpopular choices. The cuts will be expected to make savings of £21 million in 2012/13 and a further £10 million in 2013/14 to ensure that the budgets are balanced.
Council officials have said that having to provide more care for vulnerable sections of the community has increased pressures on already stretched budgets. The number of children the council are having to provide care for is now 13% higher than it was in February when the budget was originally set. This is a huge rise in ten months, and highlights the issues of child poverty that for many goes unnoticed in York.
Recent figures released by the City of York Council show that nearly 5,000 of York’s children are in poverty. With relative poverty defined as including children from households with an income below 60 per cent of the average, after housing costs have been paid, it is a staggering statistic that one in eight of the city’s children are growing up in poverty.
Councillor Julie Gunnell, the cabinet member for corporate services said: “We will need to make those tough decisions to ensure we can protect services for the most vulnerable member of our communities.”
With protecting the vulnerable areas of our community seemingly a priority for the council, there will however be many charities and council funded organisations protecting the vulnerable who will fear that they, and the people they support, will ultimately suffer as a result of the savings.
Increasing fuel and energy costs, Land Tax costs, and inflation rates on contracts with their external providers mean that the council is facing multiple pressures on their budget. And with Boris Johnson setting his sights on reducing the amount of money allocated to regional councils from London tax payers bills, the pressures do not look likely to ease any time soon.
Johnson claimed that it is “absolutely crazy” the London does not keep more of its tax revenues; “What you need is a greater share – for mayoralties in the big cities – of the tax that’s raised locally.
“It’s absolutely crazy that here in London we spend such a small proportion of the tax which is raised locally. When you look at other big cities around the world, their mayoralties have a far bigger share of local business rate or equivalent and we will be working to do that.”
So with seemingly little choice other than to make tough decisions, where will the savings be made? The meeting on 6th December may shed more light on this and the impacts of these decisions are bound to reverberate throughout the city for many years to come.
Let us know where you think the savings should, or shouldn’t be made.
