DESPITE huge financial pressures Neath Port Talbot Council hopes to deliver a 2025/26 budget for its residents without significant cuts in essential services like social services, housing and specialist education for which demand is soaring.
After years of chronic underfunding, budget cuts and increased income generation including Council Tax increases, have again been needed to balance the 2025/26 budget.
This year, a budget gap of £15.031m was identified but with a raft of savings and income generation proposals, this has been reduced to £6.398m with residents being consulted on a potential 7% increase in Council Tax. This is well below the Welsh Government assumption that councils in Wales will increase Council Tax by 9.3%.
The proposed 7% increase in Neath Port Talbot represents (across all Council Tax bands) an average increase of £2.15 per week.
A total of 67,000 households in Neath Port Talbot are liable for Council Tax but thanks to the Council Tax Reduction Scheme, around 11,000 receive full support so pay no Council Tax with another 5,000 getting partial support to pay Council Tax.
In 2025/26 the proposed total budget for Neath Port Talbot is £405.374m. The majority of this will be invested in education and schools, social services, housing and community safety. The investment will be:
Education and Lifelong Learning (ELLL) Directorate
£121.129m for the delegated schools budget and £34.331m into the ELLL Directorate – an increase of £14.689m for schools and £1.193m for ELLL compared to last year.
This investment will be used to educate around 22,000 children and young people and to tackle specific issues such as persistent absenteeism, to meet significant pressure for specialist planned places for children and young people with complex needs and to ensure all pupils get the appropriate specialist provision for their needs. Currently nearly all specialist provisions are at full capacity. Historically, secondary schools in Neath Port Talbot have been among the most underfunded in Wales and this proposed budget will address this.
Social Services, Housing and Community Safety Directorate:
The budget proposals provide investment of £127.219m, an increase of £13.520m or 11.9% compared with 2024/25.
This investment will be used to support 2,400 vulnerable children and their families, more than 2,500 adults needing care and support and 250 people who are homeless or at risk of becoming homeless. It will also increase the number of placements for those with complex needs, maintain a stable social care workforce and go some way to offsetting the increasing costs of care.
In preparing the proposed 2025/26 budget, Neath Port Talbot Council’s Cabinet listened carefully to residents’ views. And following consultation with the public a number of proposals have been dropped including introducing three weekly waste collections, removal of wheelie bins and the introduction of green waste charges (saving £730,000), reducing the neighbourhood services workforce (£379,000), reducing the highways repair team and highways maintenance budget (£210,000) and recovering immediately the full costs of school cleaning – now phased over two years (£157,000)
As no alternative suggestions were received the removal of these resulted in an increased budget gap requiring an increase in Council Tax.
This year’s provisional settlement (funding contribution to council services) from the Welsh Government was a 4.4% or £12.977m increase on last year – an improvement on the 0.5% or £1.5m initially modelled.
Although nowhere near enough to plug the funding gap, this additional funding will have to be used to meet both greater than anticipated inflationary costs and also additional investment in services including an extra £1.5m for the schools delegated budget and a further investment to stabilise the Social Services, Housing and Community Safety budget which has been relying previously on using reserves to fund core costs.
There is also a proposal to invest an additional £110,000 into the Environmental Health Team. This will fund two additional members of staff specifically to start addressing issues with ruinous and dilapidated commercial buildings.
The budget proposals are contained in a report (add link) which will be considered by Neath Port Talbot Council’s Cabinet on February 26, 2025, with final approval due to be made at a full meeting of council on March 5, 2025.
