Nottinghamshire County Council Budget Consultation 2022

Overview

What Nottinghamshire County Council does

We want to create a healthy, prosperous and greener future for everyone who lives and works in Nottinghamshire. 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 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, supporting better Broadband and we 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.

How we are rising to the challenge

The scale of the financial challenge facing the Council next year is currently estimated at £34.8 million. This estimated funding gap rises to £73.8 million when looking at this over the next 3 years.

As a council we have a proven track record in balancing our budgets and saving money. We’ve delivered £300m worth of savings over the last 10 years just through transforming services and continue to do all we can to mitigate and reduce pressures on our budget. We’ve introduced life changing ‘prevention’ services that also help to reduce demand for expensive care. Around 90 per cent of people over 65 who have used our services that help them become independent after leaving hospital are still living in their own home after three months. This reduces their reliance on urgent and expensive care and helps them live better lives.

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.

We want you to tell us what matters to you.