All council services considered for potential cuts in next year’s budget

Ted Peskett, local democracy reporter

All council services in Cardiff will be looked at for potential cuts as the city’s local authority prepares to deal with a huge budget gap next year, one of its cabinet members has said.

Cardiff Council’s cabinet member for finance, Cllr Chris Weaver, called the £49m budget gap that the council expects to face in 2025-26 “very concerning” and added that council tax will play a part in helping to close it.

Every year councils have to set a balanced budget. In recent years this task has become more and more difficult for local authorities across the country with rising costs and increased demand on services.

As budget gaps get larger councils are having to turn to unpopular cuts to services and increased fees and charges more often.

Street cleansing

For its 2024-25 budget Cardiff council looked at reducing street cleansing and the number of public bins on residential streets. These didn’t make it through the to final proposals but other controversial moves like reducing the number of black bin bag collections did.

When asked if the council will be considering these again for 2025-26 Cllr Weaver said: “At this stage it is just too early to rule anything out.

“We will look at all of our services, every service we offer, and we will think about whether we can continue to afford to deliver it in the same way.

“There will have to be consideration of those things. We always need to balance saving money with delivering the services that the council absolutely has to do.

“We have to makes sure that they are the right ones for us and obviously last year… say the public bins, they were things we wanted to protect because of the impact we have but when you face a gap of that scale if there isn’t significant change in some of our external assumptions everything is on the table at this point unfortunately.”

Controversial

Other controversial budget proposals that Cardiff Council has made over the years include bringing in a private operator for St David’s Hall, moving the Museum of Cardiff out of its current home in the Old Library and turning it into a mobile attraction – this didn’t go ahead in the end – and changing the frequency of black bin bag collections.

The local authority also brought in a booking fee for bulky waste collections in 2023.

Cllr Weaver said: “In order to close that gap we are looking at all of the things we always look at about how we can do things differently within the council more efficiently using technology, changing the way we work, looking for alternative sources of funding where there is opportunity for grant funding or other ways of bringing in an income.

“We will always look to do that first to try and close that gap but ultimately what we have had to do over recent years when we have had large budget gaps is we have done all of that but it has often come in combination with an element of a council tax increase and sometimes an element of service changes so we have cut some of the frontline services.”

In March 2024 Cardiff Council voted through budget proposals that included a 6% council tax increase and increases for the cost of school meals, car parking, and residential parking permits.

Welsh average

Some councils in Wales increased their council tax above the Welsh average of 7% with Pembrokeshire County Council (11%), Ceredigion County Council (10%), Bridgend County Borough Council (9%), and Wrexham County Borough Council (9%) setting the biggest increases.

Cllr Weaver said the council will not propose an exact figure for council tax change until spring 2025 when it will know more about how much money it needs to make up.

He added: “Council tax will be part of [the budget] but council tax alone doesn’t close that gap.

“The thing we are doing now we are looking to drive out every efficiency saving we can in terms of how we work internally and then where we think there may have to be changes or cuts to frontline services that is what we consult on in terms of the budget process.

“It is too early to say exactly which services we may have to look at. What we will do is… we do seek the views of the people of Cardiff on this.

“This autumn there will be an Ask Cardiff survey which goes out and asks residents a whole series of questions about the city that help inform the council make decisions.

“Some of that will ask around where people’s priorities are for services and that will help guide us in which services we need to protect the most and which we unfortunately may have to make changes to.”

This year Cardiff Council has had to deal with a budget gap of £30m. In 2023-24, it faced a budget gap of £24m – just over half the size of the gap it expects to face in 2025-26.

According to current estimates, Cardiff Council will continue to face financial hardship beyond 2025-26 with one council report stating that it will face a budget gap of £148m over the period 2025-26 to 2028-29.

Cllr Weaver said: “Obviously decisions made by the Westminster government in any future budgets potentially can change that because that changes the amount of money the Welsh Government receives.

“They then have a decision on how they split it up between local government and other services but nonetheless the decision made in Westminster will have an impact on what we can expect from Welsh Government.

“At the moment our projections are based on what is known about planned public spending.

“Like many local authorities we are all very keen to see what decisions are made by the chancellor this autumn, next spring, ans in future years and on that basis things could change but it is not something we know yet for certain how quickly it will.”