Funding our future: Budget Consultation 2025/26

Overview

Welcome to our budget consultation. Your responses will help us set the budget for the next financial year. 

Westmorland and Furness Council is now in its second year of delivering many of your essential local services—from waste collection and recycling to social care, education, roads, planning and so much more.

Following Local Government Reorganisation we have worked hard over the last 18 months to bring together the work of four councils into one and stabilise our many services.

Becoming a new unitary council has given us the opportunity to think and do things differently, challenge and maximise efficiency and effectiveness and it has given us a platform from which to develop and deliver on the Westmorland and Furness Council Plan in a Westmorland and Furness Way. Putting our communities at the heart of everything we do, providing excellent services to residents and businesses and delivering on our vision to be “A great place to live, work and thrive”.

In our first two years we have rightly focused on stabilisation; bringing together services, teams, systems, and processes. Our priority is getting the basics right, and doing the basics well so that we can set the necessary foundations to then drive through change and improvements and efficiencies and work as one team.

In addition to stabilising services, we are also driving through change so that we can continue to demonstrate value for money but importantly also seize the opportunity of being a unitary council that delivers good services to the public.

We have embarked on a change agenda that includes the critical services of Waste and Planning and also Children’s and Adult services as they continue on their improvement journey.

The way we are working is changing to have a stronger community focus in respect of early intervention and prevention and place based service delivery. Alongside this we will promote digital ways of working and enable fit for purpose technology to minimise the internal processes and functions so that service delivery teams are empowered to deliver effective services that make a difference to residents.

These are big and complex tasks and we recognise that change is going to be a continuous part of our journey as we aim to maximise all the benefits of becoming a unitary and a new council on a mission to deliver on our ambitions.

In our first year, despite a difficult financial climate and the challenges of being a brand new council, we delivered a balanced budget with a reduced ask for the exceptional financial support that Government had approved as part of the LGR process. Our initial ask was for £26m of borrowing to fund revenue costs but in the end we only required £18m.

For 2024/25 we are on target to deliver over £10m of savings alongside the one off use of earmarked reserves of a net £11m. This has meant we have been able to invest in doing things differently, ensuring that capacity is reflective of the demands of being a new council and recognising the ongoing financial costs as well as benefits of local government reorganisation.

Despite this financial achievement this year we have an additional £12.5m of savings to find in order to achieve a balanced budget for 2025/26 onwards. We have a responsibility to be financially sustainable and that means we need to identify permanent changes to the budget to achieve a balanced position going forward. We continue to have growing pressures from demand and legislative changes and so it is important that we continue to focus our budget to support our priorities and vision. This is becoming harder to achieve each year but being financially responsible we want to make the best and most efficient use of our resources to deliver on our promises to you.

Doing all of this will help ensure that we can continue to deliver ongoing improvements to services for our residents and communities and demonstrate that we can deliver value for money in all that we deliver.

As part of our financially sustainable approach we are seeking your views on a proposed Council Tax increase for 2025/26, including a proposal for the Adult Social Care precept that will help support the cost of increasing demand.

You can read the full Council Plan on our website at westmorlandandfurness.gov.uk.

Sam Plum, Chief Executive

Councillor Andrew Jarvis, Deputy Leader and Finance Portfolio Holder

Why your views matter

We welcome comments and views on the proposals. 

Your feedback to this consultation will be presented to the Westmorland and Furness Cabinet and Council in February 2025 for a final decision.

Please submit your response by 17 January 2025.

The full consultation booklet is available to view in the 'Related Document' link at the bottom of this page.