Decision details

Cabinet discussed proposals for the 2024/25 fees and charges. The fees and charges proposals were originally presented to Cabinet in October 2023 as part of the main budget report in order to support the 2024-25 budget setting process and were subsequently taken to the Overview & Scrutiny Panel earlier this month. Work undertaken looked to ensure that charges would remain competitive and that income budget expectations were realistic, allowing the Councils to manage existing shortfalls of actual income against budget.

Members of the Overview & Scrutiny Panel were made aware of the fundamental changes to Cabinet’s assumptions around fees and charges; these being a review of the fee increase and where possible, bringing these nearer to 5%. As a result the budget for 2024/25 now included the allocation of £116k to help facilitate this. The revised annex to this report, being the detailed schedule, was not available for that Overview and Scrutiny Panel meeting and the Portfolio Holder for Corporate Services indicated to members of the Panel that it would be brought to Cabinet at the end of January for consideration. The main changes related to parking, bin replacement, garden waste and the crematorium.

At the Panel, there were comments made around community events charges. Cabinet confirmed that as per the annex to the report, the application fees for community events, together with the day-rate costs for community, charity and commercial events have been frozen. This meant that there was no increase in these community event costs. However, given the difficulty splitting out parking charges for events from wider parking fees and charges, the suspension of parking bay charges for events could not be frozen for community events.

Councillor Austin spoke under Council Procedure Rule 20.1.

Cabinet agreed to recommend the fees and charges as set out in the report to Full Council for approval.