Shaping Our Services
Cheshire East is facing financial pressures arising from:
- Inflationary increases in costs of services.
- Demographic changes leading to increased service
requirements.
- Legislative and best practice impacts on service delivery.
- Costs associated with aggregation of services.
- Falling income from the impact of recession.
- In year spending pressures.
Services are funded from council tax, government grants and
charges to users. This income is not likely to significantly
increase in the short term.
The council is managing these pressures through its Business
Planning Process which considers organisational and service
priorities when allocating resources.
The process of developing budgetary proposals, for example
changes to service levels, and capital schemes, for example
improving roads, schools and IT systems, for the next three years
began in July 2009 when the process was launched. This
includes two rounds of consultation.
Round 1 - November
Following development of initial ideas the council asked partner
organisations for their views on council services. This was done
via a series of stakeholder meetings in Knutsford, Congleton and
Nantwich. The presentation used for those events can be downloaded
here:
The feedback from those events has been analysed and the results
are set out in the Summary of Feedback Forms
document (PDF, 29KB).
Thank you to all those who took part. This feedback was reported
to Cheshire East Council cabinet members on 22 December to inform
their deliberations on the budget, which will be set at the council
meeting in February.
Round 2 - January 2010
Detailed budgetary options have been published in the first
Cheshire East
Pre Budget Report (PDF, 729KB). This document takes a
fresh approach to consulting on the budget by setting out what
service and performance levels it is intended to deliver.
Several stakeholder meetings are being arranged to seek feedback
from:
- Trades Unions - Thursday 7th January
- Schools Forum - Tuesday 12th January
- Businesses – Wednesday 13th January
- Town and Parish Councils – Monday 18th January
- People & Places – Wednesday 20th January
and the document will be made available in libraries, council
buildings and on request by emailing
us.
Slides from the events
Comments can be also be sent to the above
e-mail address. All comments need to be received in advance of
Council on 25th February to form part of the 2010/11 Budget Setting
process.