Council unveils £8.6m of budget savings

Almost £9m is set to be cut from a Lancashire council's budget from April.

Blackpool Council's savings are coming mostly from adult social care and children's services - while council tax bills are also expected to go up by 5%.

Other services including libraries, leisure centres, street cleansing and bin collections would be protected from the savings, it said.

The authority said no jobs would be lost.

The £8.6m of savings comes despite the council receiving an extra £17.7m in central government funding.

Council leader Councillor Lynn Williams said the additional government funding was a lifeline, without which potential cuts would have been much worse, the Local Democracy Reporting Service said.

She said: "For the first time, in a long time, we have received a local government settlement that is fair and begins to tackle some of the pressures we are facing.

"Our spending power will increase by £17.7m (9%).

"This is the lifeline we desperately need to face rising demand in adult and children's social care, inflation rises and the potential impact of National Insurance increases."

She added: "I dread to think what non-statutory services we would have had to cut if we had not received this settlement. That said, we are still in a position that we need save to £8.6m in the upcoming financial year."

Councillor Paul Galley, leader of the Conservative opposition blamed the crisis on Labour for producing an "undeliverable" budget saying, "people are going to be paying more and getting less".

He added: "We have a long history over overspending in children's services and more recently adult services - they [Labour] have never been able to deliver a budget and it does not fill me with confidence."

Mr Galley said Labour never applied for levelling up funding from the previous government to expand the town's housing stock.

He added: "Instead they chose to invest in the town centre and not where people live and that has affected their council tax income."

The main areas of savings include £3.7m from adult services, where a review of home care has found care packages can be reduced for clients able to use alternative community services designed to encourage independent living.

Nearly £2m will be saved from the children's services budget due to increased contributions from the NHS for the care of children with complex needs.

Council staff will once again be asked to take a minimum of five days unpaid leave.

The budget proposals will go before the council's executive on 5 February.

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