Overview
As a council, we provide hundreds of services and we are building new facilities like leisure centres, care homes, and investing in schools. We have award-winning parks and Ofsted rates our social care services as good. However, like many councils, we are under tremendous financial pressure.
Local Government funding is a national issue. Many councils have needed financial help from the Government. We are not in that situation but like many councils, we need to make significant changes to our services.
Rising costs and increasing demand for some services were already putting significant pressure on many of our services. This, coupled with a substantial increase in demand for adult social care and rising costs in children’s residential care, means our costs are forecast to be £32m more than our income in 2025/26.
Adult and children’s social care are services that most of us hope we never need to use for ourselves or our families, but when they are needed, we must provide them. Not only are we required to provide them by law, but they also make the most fundamental difference to people's lives - those who need our help the most.
Working more efficiently is no longer enough to absorb the additional costs, and we cannot raise Council Tax, which funds most of our services, by more than 5 per cent without a referendum.
Over 60 per cent of your Council Tax is used to fund adult social care and children’s services, so finding more money for these services is getting harder and harder, and we cannot raise Council Tax by more than 5 per cent without a referendum.
We consulted the public in January 2025 on a range of proposals to reduce costs. You can see the public feedback in the budget consultation report, which councillors considered before making a final decision on the budget.
Over 2,000 people took part in the public consultation, and your feedback was extremely helpful in setting a budget. We've had to make tough decisions to ensure we can continue to provide vital services for our residents.
We remain focused on becoming more efficient and looking for ways to reduce costs without having a detrimental impact on services for residents, and that is reflected in the budget.
As part of this, the Council is reshaping the organisation to reduce costs by £10 million. This means reducing non-essential spend and losing some staff.
Councillors voted against plans to close Dunstable Library two days a week and to close Household Waste Recycling Centres two days a week.
The vast majority of council services will continue unchanged, and we will:
- invest in new school places
- transition schools to the two-tier system
- provide more specialist school places for children with special educational needs
- provide new care home facilities and leisure centres
- invest in maintaining our roads, including more money for cleaning roadside drains to help alleviate flooding
Understanding our budget plans 2025-2026
Please read the information in the following pages (click on the boxes) to read about the proposals.
Explaining different council budgets
Follow each link below to find out more about our budgets.
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