Your views wanted on next year's Budget
To help balance next year's budget, we are proposing to raise extra money by increasing council tax by no more than 2%.
This will still leave us £24m short of what we need for services. £5m of the extra costs we face next year comes from the Government requiring us to do more and more things, but expecting local people to pay for them.
We aim to make £19m efficiency savings next year from cost cutting, service changes, cutting staff numbers, driving harder bargains when we buy services and more efficient ways of working. But we need to find even more. Here are some of the ways we propose to find this money:
Streamlining management
We are reviewing our management structures to streamline the organisation.
More realistic charging
The Government sets some charges but we set others. We plan to ask users to pay more towards the costs of providing some services and reduce or remove some of the subsidies currently provided by council taxpayers for others. We will continue to offer discounts for people who receive benefits.
Staff costs
We are assuming that there will be a wage freeze next year for public sector workers, except those whose pay rises are decided by national pay review bodies, such as teachers and firefighters.
Driving harder bargains
We will continue to use our considerable buying power to drive down costs and join with others where we can, to make public money work even harder.
Targeting our spending better
Voluntary agencies provide many services on our behalf and every year, we spend almost £29m of your money buying them. This year we plan to review many of these contracts and buy (or commission) only those which meet priority needs.
Absorbing the costs of inflation
We usually increase budgets in line with inflation to help services meet cost rises etc. This year, we have asked services to find other savings to manage those extra costs.
Your can email your views to haveyoursay@norfolk.gov.uk
Please respond by 22 January 2010, so we can share your comments with members at the Cabinet meeting on 25 January. Cabinet will then recommend a budget to a meeting of Full Council on 15 February.
For more information about next year's Budget, click here
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