The Chancellor’s Spending Review and Autumn Statement enabled local authorities responsible for social care to impose greater increases of council tax before being required to hold a referendum seeking approval of the change. Lincolnshire County Council are set to use this new power to increase council tax for 2016/17 by  3.95%.

What should LCC cut?

Yet as the Conservative leader of the Council Cllr Martin Hill has said, “extra money raised from this ‘social care precept’ won’t even cover the extra cost to our care contracts from the national living wage increase”.

Here in Lincolnshire we will see massive cuts, with dwindling financial reserves now available to cushion the impact, this is going to translate very quickly into the loss of services. That is because the Chancellor has slashed the grant LCC receive from Government by almost a third.

The County Council are holding a series of consultation events in January and running an online survey asking for residents views on the priorities for funding of the Council’s discretionary services. Under threat are subsidies for rural bus services, libraries, road repairs, gritting, PCSOs, school crossing patrols, and other ‘luxuries’ such as support for people with mental health problems, and funding for crisis support like food banks.

I do support the end of the Big Society Fund which is being considered although I would hope there could be alternative schemes to support local causes. The Big Society Fund allows individual County Councillors to make decisions on awarding £2,000 each year. I am concerned about incumbent councillors being able to use their decisions to award public funds to support their re-election, giving them a privileged position not available to any other candidates. I am very much in favour of any spending of public funds being subject to proper scrutiny by the Council as a whole.

Local authorities like Lincolnshire have been left with little choice but to increase council tax bills for residents in response to the Chancellor’s huge cut to local government support grants. We’re now seeing the inevitable tax rises which were hidden in the Spending Review.