The challenge of doing more with less

Like most local councils across the country, we are facing a huge challenge to find the money for current services and the pressure is increasing. More families and children are struggling and need help, while the cost of services continues to rise and we continue to receive very little funding from the Government.

It is our role to provide essential support as your local council for the most vulnerable and deliver services that make the area a great place to live, work and visit. Our core budget relies primarily on what we receive from council tax and the proportion of business rates we are allowed to keep to provide local services.

Despite making savings in recent years, we are now having to make very difficult choices to balance the books.

In the next financial year we will spend £178m on services, with support for vulnerable people a top priority. Most of our budget will be spent supporting the increasing social care needs of children and adults and providing accommodation for the growing number of people needing temporary housing.

Currently 60p of every £ in Council Tax is spent on essential services and support.

We are supporting more than 1,000 of Kingston’s most vulnerable children such as care placements and home-to-school transport for those with special educational needs. We are helping 3,000 adults and carers with placements, help at home, mental health support and community day services. We are also continuing to invest in ‘in-home’ technology to help people maintain their independence and remain living in their own homes for as long as possible.

The national housing crisis is in a critical situation and we are supporting close to 1,000 families and individuals with temporary accommodation who we have a legal duty to support. This will cost an estimated £5.2m this year, almost double last year’s £2.7m.

We are also building Kingston’s first new, sustainable council homes in 40 years. New council housing has been completed at two sites. Families have moved into 18 homes at Arun House in Kingston and 19 homes at York Way in Chessington. Construction is also underway on 2,170 new homes on the Cambridge Road Estate, 871 of which will be council homes.

Despite the financial challenges, we’re continuing our climate commitments, one of the first councils in the UK to fully replace our waste fleet with electric vehicles. We have installed 250 electric vehicle charging points and replaced 6,000 street lights with LED bulbs which use half the power of older lights. We have also upgraded 21 community parks, planted 450 trees and our waste and recycling service has completed 800,000 collections a month. We have achieved a 45 per cent recycling rate — one of the best in London.

We are working to find more cost-effective ways to deliver the best possible services. We no longer have the money to continue services in the same way, so our work with communities, voluntary groups and partners to do things differently is more important than ever.

More than £400,000 is committed for grants and commissioning for the voluntary and community sector to provide advice and guidance services. By the end of this Financial Year we will have awarded £720,000 in Community Resilience Fund grants to organisations supporting communities, with more than £139,000 in neighbourhood grants having been made to projects that benefit residents.

We have been able to balance the budget for 2024-25, which has been even more difficult to achieve than last year. As well as delivering next year’s budget commitments, we will continue to take a long-term approach to manage the significant gap between the money we receive and the cost of services for future years.

We are keen to hear views on how we plan our finances over the next three financial years, 2025-28. Our ‘Let’s Talk’ portal is at “kingstonletstalk.co.uk/finance/budget-planning-2025-2028”. You can also join our residents’ panel to help improve services at “kingstonletstalk.co.uk/engagement/kingston-panel”.