Time to Talk Budget

Bridgend County Borough Council’s budget consultation 2025/26

The current situation

Across the UK, local authorities are facing massive financial challenges as a result of funding cuts and events ranging from the Covid-19 pandemic to the ongoing Cost Of Living Crisis.

Each council service now costs more to deliver to residents – not just big projects such as building new schools, but things like energy bills for day centres and care homes, maintaining the highways network, or helping people who are homeless.

Because of increased demand, we have also experienced budget overspends in important areas such as social services and home-to-school transport.

Council funding

The money we use to pay for services comes mainly from an annual Welsh Government budget settlement as well as council tax and income generated via fees and charges.

For 2025-26, the council is set to receive a budget settlement increase of 4 per cent. Unfortunately, this will not be enough to deal with increased costs and higher demand for services.

In order to set the fully balanced budget required by law, we believe that savings of £9.1m will need to be found in 2025-26.

The only way we can do this is by making some very difficult decisions about the council services that we currently provide and prioritise. We will also need to consider how we might meet the challenges that future years will bring.

Our budget principles

In developing the budget for 2025-26, we will:

• Seek to safeguard and protect the most vulnerable people in our communities.
• Encourage residents and communities to support themselves, and provide advice to enable this to happen.
• Seek to limit service growth in the coming financial year.
• Require all directorates to contribute to overall savings required in coming years.
• Maintain an efficient ‘back office’ service to support service delivery and transformation.
• Be mindful of predicted public sector financial austerity in coming years, and plan to ensure the financial viability of the council.
• Seek to recover the cost of services via fees and charges where it is possible to do so.

In addition, in order to help us continue to prioritise the most vulnerable, we want this budget to protect our current investments into education, early intervention services, and social services and well-being.

Have your say

This consultation is designed to ensure that you can have a say in the budget-setting process. It builds upon the results of last year’s process, during which you told us that we should look at introducing charges or increasing them if they were already in place, reduce staffing costs, and review what levels of service are deliverable.

To maximise efficiency savings, you also told us to review our use of buildings and assets, and to consider the service arrangements that we have in place with partner organisations.

We have taken action and have made significant progress on all of the above, and will continue to do so as we look towards 2025-26.

The results of this consultation will be carefully analysed and taken into consideration, and we will seek to reflect the views of as many people as possible in the final budget proposals – thank you for taking part.