Rutland County Council leader explains why the authority is struggling financially despite high council tax costs

Families up and down the country are trying to make ends meet as prices rise whilst incomes do not and to some extent Rutland County Council has the same problems as individuals, writes Rutland County Council leader Gale Waller (Lib Dem).

Fuel bills, salary increases and the rise in the cost of raw materials all contribute to the increased costs the council are facing. At its meeting on July 10, councillors agreed to re-let the council’s grounds maintenance contract following a robust tendering exercise.

We have to pay more for this contract than we did previously, despite moving, for environmental reasons, from 10 to six cuts a year and this trend of increased costs, I fear, will only be the beginning as we move to let the waste contract later in the year and face the challenge of providing an effective public bus system within our means in the coming months.

But why is living within our means in Rutland County Council so difficult? We all know that we have one of the highest council tax rates in the country.

The problem lies with the source of our council funding. Like all local authorities we are funded in part by government grant (including a share of business rate) and in part by council tax. The main government grant is calculated according to a nationally set formula which takes elements such as deprivation into account. There is an element for sparsity, that is sparsity of population, but it does not compensate for the factors which favour towns and cities. In 2013/14 this formula was reviewed to make funding fairer but inevitably there were some authorities which would have lost funding as well as Rutland who would have gained and to minimise this a “dampening” system was applied. This has not been changed in the intervening 10 years so rural areas are even worse off now than we were then as the gap has been compounded.

Overall, urban areas get 38 per cent more government funded spending power than rural ones (spending power is what the government thinks we should be spending on services and covers council tax as well as government grant) despite it costing more to deliver basic services in rural areas. Just think how many extra miles a refuse truck travels in a rural area to collect bins compared with a town with terraced housing! That 38 per cent extra funding in urban areas equates to £135 per head of population! In practice residents in rural areas pay 20 per cent (£110 per head) more in council tax than our urban counterparts because government gives more funding to urban areas.

And it is not just a case of urban areas needing more money for basic services. As a result of this additional funding urban authorities, in 2022/23, budgeted to spend almost double that of rural services on discretionary services such as cultural services, sports provision and services for young people. They were able to do this because they had more money per head of population to start with!

As councillors in Rutland there is nothing we can do to change this inequitable funding system save for lobbying our MP and ministers but what we can, and will, be doing is to make sure every pound at our disposal is wisely spent and that Rutland County Council is as efficient as possible.