How your council tax is spent 2023/24
Posted March 2023
Our team of nearly 1,500 staff provide hundreds of services that link together to improve the lives of everyone who lives, works or visits the borough.
You probably use many of these every day without realising or thinking about how they’re funded, whether that’s street lighting, highway maintenance, drainage, bin collections, schools, parks, libraries or leisure centres.
We also provide services you may not need right now, or may never need, like social care for adults and children. These services are vital to many residents and are where most of our money is actually spent.
Our costs are rising significantly and we’re having to work out how we can keep these essential services running while ensuring people still live life to the full.
Everyone's feeling the pressure - including us
We know the cost of living crisis is hitting you, but it’s also hurting local councils like us as well as businesses. Our energy costs, in particular, are increasing because we aren’t protected by the national price cap.
This crisis, along with the impact of the coronavirus pandemic, has put unprecedented pressure on us. We’re also seeing increased demand for statutory services, including support for children and young people with special educational needs and disabilities, and this is an added challenge.
Despite all of this, we’re committed to protecting our social care to ensure that everyone remains safe and knows they are a valued member of the Wokingham borough community.
So where does your council tax money go?
35p: Adult Social Care - including Adult Safeguarding, Adult Social Care and Public Health
23p: Children’s Services - including Child Safeguarding, Children’s Social Care, Corporate Parenting and School Support
29p: Place and Growth - including Transport and Highways, Waste and Recycling, Planning, Community Safety, Parks and Open Spaces
7p: Resources and Assets - including Finance, Governance and Democratic Process, Procurement, Property and Assets
6p: Chief Executive’s Office - including Libraries, Climate Emergency, IT, HR and Communications
On average, more than 35 per cent of the money we receive from council tax every year funds social care support for adults across the borough.
If we have a disability or health condition, which could affect us at any time, we might need help to continue living in our community, surrounded by loved ones and enjoying as many of the things we value as possible.
Well-organised social care helps us stay connected to others and allows us to live the way we want, with purpose, connection and dignity, at all stages.
We work with partners to help people use their skills to the full, improving their wellbeing and benefiting others, while uniting family, friends and neighbours to help people pursue what matters most.
This involves a wide range of support across many teams like the safeguarding team, who keep people safe, or occupational therapists who help people stay at home for longer if this is possible and they want to do so.
Our voluntary and charity partners include CLASP, a group for adults with learning difficulties, and The Link Visiting Service, a befriending service to combat loneliness.
The main purpose of Children’s Services is to support and protect vulnerable children, and 23p of every pound you pay in council tax contributes to funding this important work.
We need to bring some children into our care to ensure they are safe from harm. Many of these children need all kinds of support to help them achieve, stay healthy and be prepared for adulthood, and this extends beyond them leaving our care.
We also keep children safe through Child Protection Plans, working with them and their families to address issues which may put them at risk of harm and stop these from getting worse. For other vulnerable children, we provide "child in need" support to ensure they have what they need to thrive.
Of course, it's important that we work with children, young people and families to tackle emerging problems as soon as possible, and our Early Help services offer a range of interventions to tackle these before they escalate.
A solid foundation for the rest of their lives
Our education teams focus on helping vulnerable children and young people to achieve on a similar level to their peers, and we support those with special educational needs and disabilities to achieve the best they can.
We support children in schools in lots of different ways, including educational psychology, mental health support teams and education welfare, as well as supporting families who choose to home educate.
We have a “virtual school”, which provides bespoke support to help children in care overcome any barriers to meeting their potential, and a service that helps young people who aren't in education, employment or training (NEET) to access opportunities.
We improve access to education by providing transport both within and outside the borough for pupils who live far away from where they learn, or who need more help to be able to get there, and also manage school admissions.
These are just some examples of the diverse, complex work our children’s services teams carry out in partnership with many other organisations.
Place and Growth is an area of the council which supports a number of "universal" services that most, if not all of our residents use.
Some 29 per cent of your council tax pays for these services including transport and highways, waste and recycling, planning and community safety, and parks and open spaces.
Active travel, transport and highways
Our transport and highways teams cover the pavements, paths and roads we use from the second we leave our homes, maintaining this complex system so you can travel how you like and as easily as possible.
Keeping you safe is our top priority, so our partners VolkerHighways regularly inspect the network.
We also promote active travel – or walking, cycling and wheeling – through our My Journey Wokingham team, who run all kinds of classes and competitions to help people get outside more.
They also work to secure more infrastructure for active travel, which is a crucial part of our mission to improve air quality and do all we can to tackle the climate emergency.
Waste and recycling
Our waste and recycling collections and grass cutting are part of our environmental services, also part of Place and Growth.
Due to current pressures, we can't continue with weekly household collections. Changing to fortnightly general rubbish and recycling collections, with food still collected weekly, would save about £1million a year.
More than 9,000 people took part in our recent consultation and the council’s decision-making executive agreed these changes at its meeting in March 2023.
Starting from late summer 2024, your general rubbish will be collected one week and recycling the next, while food waste will continue to be collected every week.
You will also receive a wheeled bin to store and put out your general rubbish, instead of the current system of using blue plastic bags.
We'll continue working to provide the most efficient service possible while keeping everyone safe and well, especially those in the greatest need - and we will continue to be open and transparent about how we intend to do this.
Where we can, we will avoid making savings in ways that will directly affect residents. For example, when vacancies crop up in each department, we review each one on a case-by-case basis to make sure we’re operating as effectively as possible.
Because many now work from home some of the time, we have moved our staff to the bottom two floors of our Shute End offices in Wokingham to allow us to use the building more efficiently.
This will allow us to consider the future of the top two floors, which won’t be used for the time being, while saving on energy bills.
Click here for further information about how the current financial situation has shaped this year's budget and the help and support available to you if needed.
