Your views on council tax

Overview

Our government grant for 2017/18 had been calculated by the Government on the assumption that councils with responsibility for Adult Social Care, such as County Councils, will increase council tax by 2% to meet rising demand for social care, and a further inflationary amount (1.8% in 2017/18) for the increased costs of delivering services.

We had reflected this in our own planning and so our proposals for 2017/18 were based on the assumption that council tax would increase overall by 3.8%. If we did not increase council tax, then we would have had to find a further £12.7m in savings. 

On 15 December 2016 the Government announced that the provisional settlement for Norfolk would also include £4.2m for adult social care as a one off grant in 2017/18. This has been funded from reductions in the New Homes Bonus – a grant the Government pays to local authorities for new home building in their areas.

The Government also announced that it was going to let councils raise council tax by up to 3% in 2017/18 specifically to help fund adult social care (last year it was 2%) in addition to the 1.99% we are allowed to raise council tax by without a local referendum.  

Our committees will be asked to support an increase of 4.8% in Norfolk County Council's share of the Council Tax.
 

Why your views matter

We want to find out what you think our approach to setting council tax should be.  We will feed views gathered so far into committee meetings in January.  Our consultation closes on 27 January 2017 and we will report back the final findings to Full Council in February.