We must make some significant changes to some of our services.
Some of our services are statutory, and we are required to provide them by law, other services are discretionary. Some discretionary services are important because they can help reduce demand for statutory services by helping to address issues before they become serious.
We must prioritise the services we are required to provide by law.
We are a large employer; we employ over 3,000 staff. We are reshaping the organisation, reducing our costs by £10m. This will mean reducing non-essential spend and reducing the number of staff we employ across the council. This may mean we will be slower to respond to queries, waiting times may be longer and the council will have reduced capacity to deliver new projects and initiatives.
We will provide our core services including collecting your bins and fixing potholes (in line with our policy).
The budget includes:
- Cease activities associated with our Arts and Cultural Strategy. Delivery of the strategy will rely solely on external partners. The UKSPF funding for arts and culture activities that the council is currently providing is unaffected. This reduces our costs by £300,000.
- No longer provide some of our safer neighbourhood work whereby a team of officers have worked on awareness of crime within communities. We will retain our officer team who combat anti-social behaviour who will liaise with Bedfordshire Police and assist with ongoing exchange of intelligence on crime.
- Review funding for the Carers in Hospital Hub scheme. This service has already reduced in the local hospitals due to a lack of space and carers can access support via Carers in Bedfordshire, which the council funds. The council also funds Mobilise, who provide our Digital Carers Support offer. This reduces our costs by £23,000.
- Review funding for Community Catalysts, which support new small businesses (micro-enterprises) that provide care services. The service was set up at a time when the care market was challenging, and this is not now the case. This reduces our costs by £130,000.
- Funding our local welfare provision from the Household Support Fund. Local welfare provision is used for emergency payments to residents in hardship. The Household Support Fund is funding from the Government that is available until March 2025. This funding has been provided for the last few years, but there is no guarantee it will continue. This reduces our costs by £249,000.
- Review care packages where people living at home with high-cost support that exceeds the current rate for residential or nursing accommodation placements. We will provide more detail on this proposal and consult on it before making final decisions on changes, but the budget includes a significant financial target from this. This reduces our costs by £413,000 in 2025/26 and £412,000 in 2026/27.