Nottinghamshire County Council Budget Consultation 2023

Overview

What Nottinghamshire County Council does

We want to create a healthy, prosperous and greener future for everyone who lives and works in Nottinghamshire, as is set out in our 10 year vision, The Nottinghamshire Plan 2021-2031. The building blocks for this include healthy early years, education, employment and transport, as well as access to services for people needing more specialist support.

As part of this the County Council provides a huge range of services. This includes providing essential care and support for vulnerable older people. This is where the vast majority of the Council’s budget is spent. The Council also provides help, protection and care for hundreds of children and young people through a wide range of services such as children’s centres, youth services and children’s social care. We help people with learning disabilities into education and work. We support people out of hospital to get back onto their feet.

We also maintain thousands of miles of roads and pavements, commission major road projects and play a big role in planning public transport. We’re also a lead agency for flood prevention.

We run Trading Standards, protecting consumers and supporting businesses across Nottinghamshire. We fund partners to run our libraries and cultural services, as well as some of the best country parks and visitor attractions in the county.

We officiate thousands of weddings as part of the important role we play in registrations. We support the school admissions process. We also fund and commission new schools. We attract inward investment into the county, promoting and supporting access to modern, reliable broadband services, whilst we also work with partners to pave the way for investment to support businesses, jobs and housing.

We work with communities to strengthen the building blocks for good health, helping to give children the best start, supporting people wanting to make healthy changes relating to alcohol, drugs, tobacco, nutrition and exercise, and giving particular attention to people living with the harmful impacts of homelessness and domestic violence.

Each year we have a legal duty to balance our budget and just like the people in Nottinghamshire, we’re also feeling the pressures that are driving up the cost of living such as record inflation and energy costs. We also have additional demands on our services, including an increase in complex and specialist health care needs and a national shortage of social care staff. To see specific actions we are aiming to deliver over the coming months, see our Annual Delivery Plan 2023-2024, which sets out what we will do this financial year to achieve our ambitions. It also contains the measures that we will use to monitor our progress towards achieving each of the overarching ambitions found within The Nottinghamshire Plan.

How we are rising to the challenge

From 2024/25 onwards, the Council is projecting a budget shortfall of £30.8m across the duration of our Medium Term Financial Strategy, to 2026/27.

As a council we have a proven track record in balancing our budgets and saving money. We’ve delivered substantial savings over the last 10 years, in part by transforming the way we deliver some of our key services. We also continue to do all we can to mitigate and reduce pressures on our budget, whilst introducing life changing ‘prevention’ services that help to reduce demand for expensive care.

We are working to keep children safe at home wherever possible and to get more children who need specialist care into long-term family-based placements, including foster families and kinship care. Family-based placements improve children’s life chances and cost the Council less.

Investing in our highways also helps us to boost the economy and deliver better value to the taxpayer. For example, we build major new roads and junctions that will support people and businesses. We’re also changing the way we maintain our 2,500 miles of roads to reduce costs and improve our service. You can see a wide range of achievements in our Annual Report 2022-2023. 

We want you to tell us what matters to you.