Your views on our proposal to increase council tax by 2.99% in 2019/20

Overview

Norfolk County Council plays a huge part in people’s lives – ensuring children and young people have the best start in life, protecting vulnerable people, maintaining a safe road system and helping to create a thriving economy. We’ll continue to spend over a billion pounds every year providing public services that you, your family and friends use every day.

The number of people who need our services particularly those becoming more vulnerable is growing year on year. At the same time things have become more expensive so we have higher costs, and the amount of money we have coming in isn’t keeping up. Since 2011/12 the funding that central government gives us has fallen by £204 million since 2011/12 and is expected to fall to zero by 2020/21.  

As part of the Government’s efforts to balance the national books, all public services, including Norfolk County Council, are required to make savings.

Against this backdrop, we have developed a robust financial strategy to address our current challenges which is guided by the following principles:

• Offering our help early to prevent and reduce demand for specialist services
• Joining up our work so that similar activities and services are easily accessible, done well and done once
• Being business like and making best use of digital technology to ensure value for money
• Using evidence and data to target our work where it can make the most difference.

Since 2011/12 we have saved the best part of £364 million, including £246 million of efficiency savings. We are proposing to save £79 million, including new saving proposals for 2019/22, over the next three years and are identifying ways of bridging a remaining gap of £45.98 million.

Why your views matter

We want to find out what people think about our proposal to increase council tax by 2.99% in 2019/20 and how it might affect them if it went ahead.

Your views will help us to decide whether we should increase council tax in 2019/20.

We are also interested to hear your views on whether the council should consider any future opportunities to increase council tax.

We are consulting through:

- This online consultation.

- A paper copy of our consultation.

We are consulting from 5 November 2018 to 23 December 2018. Please note that if we receive any consultation responses after this date we cannot guarantee that we will be able to take them into account.

We will feed back the findings from our consultation to our county councillors as part of the evidence they will use to help them come to a decision about our proposals.

Find out more and have your say online by clicking on the feedback form below.

If you need a copy of this consultation document on paper or in a different format please email haveyoursay@norfolk.gov.uk