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We've just produced a good news budget for the people of
Windsor and Maidenhead. As You know we've been pledged to keep
the council tax at or below inflation which we've done in the past two years.
This year inflation dropped to minus 1.4 in September
and we've been able to produce a budget with a cut of 4%.
The good news is that it's not cuts to services
we are maintaining services in many ways and improving them.
So the effect on yourselves is really good and it's part of a long term plan
so that this year, next year and in further years
we'll be continuing to look at council tax and try to keep it as low as possible.
We're making the savings at the Council in a number of different ways.
We have savings in the back office by streamlining processes
we're looking to purchase smarter so we buy more wholesale prices rather than at retail,
we're making savings in a number of areas
always looking to make efficiencies.
In our planning department we are working smarter £73,000 worth of savings there,
we're looking at saving money on energy - we have transparency
in our energy consumption.
On the website you will see how the energy usage in the council buildings
is being used and that encourages managers and officers to switch off their lights
check the heating making sure we aren't spending money that we don't need to do.
The amount of savings we're making in total comes to
£6.8 million, clearly there are growth areas in the budget as well
that we're meeting but in terms of overall savings
£6.8 million is a lot of money but
we are hopeful that our officers will deliver the savings as they have done in previous years.
I want to emphasise that it's not just important that we're delivering savings
for our residents but we're also maintaining and improving services.
Some examples of the improvements that we can expect to see in the year ahead
are an increase in our community wardens to 14 from 10,
we're putting money in for the museum project
at the Guildhall in Windsor,
we're spending over a million pounds on roads which we know is very important
to our residents and we're also spending £75,000
to repair the pot holes which have occured during the recent spell of bad weather.
As you've heard from our politicians there's some very good news today
that we're announcing our intention to cut council tax by 4% during the next year.
But as Chief Executive it's very important to me that all of the savings
that we put forward are deliverable, so my team and I have worked very hard
with our politicians to make sure that the savings
that are in place are deliverable for the coming year
but also put the Council on a firm financial footing and are sustainable in the longer term.
What we've tried to do is put ourselves in the best possible position
to deliver front line public services to our residents,
the sort of services that they really value, the sort of services
that get people out of bed in the morning - the fixed pot holes that run libraries and so forth.
All of the things people really want and value but at the same time
recognizing that people don't like Council Tax
and the less Council Tax that we can possibly levy the better.
We've been working very hard over the last few months
to put a proposal of savings to our members
that enables the Council to go forward in the coming financial year
set against a backdrop of significantly reduced public spending.
In common with many public and private sector organisations
in reducing our cost space we've found that we have to make a number of
posts redundant.
However what we have been able to do in some cases is to re-deploy people into other jobs within the Council
but in other cases unfortunately we haven't been able to do that
and regrettably some people will be made redundant.
But we have to look at this on balance that if we aspire to put residents first
and residents are expecting better services with lower council tax
so therefore on balance we feel this is the right thing to do
to deliver a 4% cut in Council Tax this year.