Your guide to Council Tax

Contents

  1. How we spend our budget
  2. About your Council Tax

How we spend our budget - A message from Cllr Tracey Dixon, Leader of the Council

2024 / 25 budget

Your council tax goes towards providing public services right across South Tyneside.

Day in, day out, you interact with the services we provide. The roads you travel on, the paths you walk on, the lamps that light up our streets, the parks, beaches, leisure facilities or open spaces you might visit, and many more. From the minute you step outside your home council services and the people who provide them  are doing all they can to help you live a happy, healthy, and fulfilled life.

Your council provides a wide range of services for around 150,000 people in South Tyneside whilst tackling some of the biggest and most fundamental issues in society and providing a safety net for those who need it most. We are here to support through hardship and crisis whilst still providing the vital services that you rely on like customer services, leisure services, children's, bin collections and adult social care and much more. Providing high quality services for people across the borough is something that we pride ourselves on.

We know that the ongoing cost of living crisis is creating intense pressures, and we will continue to support you wherever we can. We have enhanced our welfare support provision and we currently support 17,200 households through our council tax support scheme. You can find out if you are eligible for this support on page 9.

Our support scheme has been recently updated to move to a banded scheme that is easier to understand. Customers will fall into one of four groups and the amount of support that they will be awarded will be clearly linked to one of five income bands.

The changes will help over 10,000 working age people in South Tyneside who need help with their council tax bills due to their personal circumstances. This is about making a fairer and more transparent council tax support system that is easier to both understand and administer.

The money we spend comes from council tax, business rates and paid services as well as the government grant we receive each year. Government funding has not kept pace with levels of inflation, in fact it has halved since 2010 putting huge pressures on our finances and reliance upon other sources of revenue such as Council Tax.

Just like everyone else, the council is experiencing increasing costs and demand. The council cannot run a deficit like other organisations. If we do not increase the amount of money coming into the Council, we would simply have to stop providing the services which our communities rely upon.

This year, the budget includes an increase in Council Tax of 4.95%.

2% of the increase relates to the Government's adult social care levy, which is ringfenced for those services supporting our communities who need it most.

Adult and children's social care continue to be our biggest areas of spend and account for over 70% of our discretionary budget. Amongst all North-East councils we expect to still have one of the lowest council tax levels.

We also seek external funding streams to support the funding of the capital investment programme. We've already been successful in securing millions for the borough including £20m from the third round of the Levelling Up Fund for Holborn Riverside, and a further £20m for Jarrow from the Long-Term Plan for Towns fund. The borough has also been named a Levelling Up Partnership Area.

The way we allocate and spend the Council's budget is guided by our residents and businesses and the priorities you have shaped in the Borough's 20-year vision and new strategic plan.

Our five ambitions are to see you financially secure, healthy and well throughout your lives, connected to jobs, skills and learning and being part of strong communities. Underpinning all this we will target support to make things fairer and direct help to those who need it most whilst doing all we can to protect our environment now and into the future.

With limited funding available to us we work relentlessly to bring in additional money to the borough so that we can progress innovative projects and schemes to improve South Tyneside in the longer term. Our capital assets like buildings, leisure centres, community facilities, coastline, parks, and open spaces are there for you to enjoy now and safeguarded for future generations to come due to our continued investment.

Councillor Tracey Dixon
Leader of the Council

View Your guide to Council Tax 2024 to 2025.

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