At the Full Council meeting on Thursday 27 February 2025 a budget will be considered and agreed for the 2025/26 year (the Council's financial year runs from 1 April to 31 March). This will include both a revenue budget and a capital budget, and in each case will also consider spend in future years.
The Council is required to split its spend between revenue (spend on every day running costs) and capital (the acquisition and improvement of the assets it owns that will last for more than one year).
Reports and proposals
The budget will be recommended to the Full Council meeting by the Council’s Cabinet (Executive) - you can read the relevant reports here.
The proposals that may have more relevance to businesses are:
- letting of the former Meltax office and former WC's in Royston town centre
- introducing payment for parking at evenings, Sundays and bank holidays - this will be subject to full consultation on how it would be implemented
- continuation of a shared Economic Development Officer post to implement the Economic Development strategy and Tourism strategy for the district
- additional staffing in our Environmental Health team
- a new part-time Commercial Waste Officer post to support the implementation of a Commercial Food Waste service.
Send us your comments
If you have any comments on the budget please e-mail ian.couper@north-herts.gov.uk by Tuesday 25 February. These comments will then be included when the budget is considered by Full Council on 27 February.
Background
The Council Plan for 2024-28 set out our vision as “working with you for a fairer, greener North Herts”. Our priorities are thriving communities, accessible services, responsible growth and sustainability.
We will focus our services and our funding on delivering our vision and priorities. However we have seen real terms cuts in our funding over many years, and we need to find ways to balance our budget. We are expecting to have some longer-term funding certainty for the period 2026-29 during next year, but at the moment we only know what our funding will be for the coming year (April 2025 – March 2026). We are also working on the assumption that the Government will prioritise spend on Local Government to Social Care and areas with higher deprivation, which means we will see a real terms cut in our funding. The level of financial reserves that we have gives us some time to plan how we balance our budget, but they can only be spent once. During 2025/26 we plan to consult on what are spend priorities should be, and therefore where we should we reduce our spend.
Over a number of years the Council has funded its capital spend from the money it has received from selling assets, particularly the transfer of its housing stock in 2003. We are now in a position where we will need to borrow money to fund capital spend in future. This means that there will be revenue costs relating to interest and the requirement to set aside money to repay the borrowing. Therefore, the Council has to continue to review its capital programme to ensure that it delivers Council priorities.