Last week we unveiled Ipswich Borough Council’s budget for the coming year.

The background to this, and every, budget for the last decade is the sweeping cuts the Conservatives have made to local government funding.

The Council receives over £11 million a year less from the Government now than it did in 2010. The total amount of funding cut over that time is a staggering £96 million.

We have managed to deal with these cuts and protect services by becoming more efficient and finding alternative income sources such as our commercial property investments which are consistently returning more than £3 million a year additional income to the Council.

It has got harder and harder every year to find these savings. The loss of income and extra costs from Covid were a huge additional challenge. But this year has been even more difficult.

The reason for this, as I outlined last week, is inflation causing a steep rise in costs which is affecting councils just as much as individual households.

We estimate that inflation will add over £15 million to the Council’s bills over the next four years. Most of this we have no control over such as the national pay settlement, interest rate increases and an astonishing rise in audit fees – affecting councils across the country – which alone will add £1.6 million to our costs.

In response, the Government has given us extra funding amounting to £2.3 million over the next four years and encouraged councils to raise council tax by an extra 1% which, in Ipswich’s case, will raise an additional £150,000 a year.

Clearly, that is a drop in the ocean compared to our actual increase in costs so we have had to look hard at what savings we can make.

Among the comprehensive set of savings we’ve identified, we have reviewed our capital programme to either remove or move back projects to reduce borrowing costs. So, for example, we were planning to spend £500,000 a year on our parks play area replacement programme but this has been reduced by £100,000 so we will not be able to do as many replacements each year. These changes to projects will save over £2m over the next four years.

Many council and business final salary pension schemes went into deficit as a result of contribution holidays taken in the 1990’s. Ipswich’s pension scheme is now fully funded so we can afford to reduce employer contributions in future which will save nearly £2 million.

We will seek to increase fees and charges with a focus on areas that are seeing the largest increase in costs and use new Government powers to increase the council tax payable on long term empty homes to encourage them back into use. These measures should bring in around £2m of additional income.

We have implemented a scheme to allow staff to voluntarily leave the Council which should save £300,000.

We will keep our popular young person’s summer I-Card scheme – which gives free access to all council sporting activities over the summer holidays – but introduce a small one-off charge for children who do not receive free school meals. This will save around £145,000.

All told we’ve identified around £18million of savings over the next four years. We’re not out of the woods yet though as inflation remains high but the Council’s finances are in a much better position now because of the tough choices we’ve made.

It means that despite this unprecedented rise in costs we will still be able to protect the council services people in Ipswich know and love: our wonderful parks, the Regent and Corn Exchange, the Museum and Mansion, our sports centres and swimming pools, keeping brown bins free of charge and our summer events programme including the ever-popular Ipswich Music Day.

Next week I’ll outline what all this means for council tax and the steps we’re taking to protect people in Ipswich from the Cost of Living Crisis.