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Northamptonshire Council: Cash-strapped authority to raise tax

BBC One Angel Square, Northamptonshire County Council HQBBC
The council will be scrapped in 2020 - along with seven other borough and district councils - to make way for two new unitary authorities

A cash-strapped local authority has announced plans to save £41.4m through cuts to its services and a 4.99% increase in council tax.

Northamptonshire County Council wants to make £23.1m worth of savings in its adult social care budget and a £10.3m cut to children's services in 2019-20.

The £418m budget goes before the council's cabinet on 14 February.

The authority will be scrapped in 2020 along with seven district councils in order to form two new unitary councils.

The council said the hike in charges, which had to be approved by the government because it exceeds the 3% cap, would amount to an extra 75p to £1 for 70% of people living in properties within the council tax bands of A to C.

This would raise £5.8m which would help fund the scrapping of plans to charge for community use of schools and help reinstate winter gritting of roads.

One Angel Square, Northamptonshire County Council HQ
The council was forced to sell off its headquarters to meet some of its debts

The council also revealed it had helped cut its 2018-19 deficits from £30.1m to £1.4m.

Conservative council leader Matt Golby said despite the large tax increase, the authority remained one of the "very lowest taxing counties in the country".

He added: "The budget proposals published today will build on this new financial stability and set this organisation, and any future new ones, on a course of far greater financial sustainability."

Labour's finance spokesman Mick Scrimshaw said the current financial difficulties could have been avoided with "steady increases" in council tax in the past, which he claimed the authority had been obsessed with avoiding.

Mr Scrimshaw said he was also concerned that the council was delivering only the care services for adults and children that it was "statutorily obliged" to provide.

"It's not always clear what the bare legal minimum is," he said.

The 2019-20 budget also includes £1.6m of savings from the public health and wellbeing budget, £3.2m of savings from the corporate functions budget as well as cuts to other council services.

Last year, the government permitted the troubled local authority to use £70m of capital receipts - largely gained from the sale of its Northampton headquarters One Angel Square - to pay off its £35m deficit.