"We’re being headlocked into doing this’, town hall chief says as Wiganers face council tax hike

The town will get around £25million from Westminister in its finance settlement to help support a 7.5 per cent hike in its core spending power for 2024/25 to £271m.

But ahead of today’s (Wednesday March 6) budget setting council meeting council leader Coun David Molyneux said that central Government has forced Wigan along with many other councils across the country into raising their council tax by the maximum allowed without a local referendum.

Without the council tax increase, Wigan would have been facing a £10m hole in its finances. With it, that deficit comes down to £2.5m with that cash already saved because of ‘efficiences’ targeted a year ago.

Wigan will raise some £145m of the money it needs to run its services for the year ahead in council tax and – unlike other authorities – the town gets to keep all of its project £126m in business rates.

The trade-off is that Wigan doesn’t get certain other grants, for example, for public health.

Meanwhile, the council will recieve an additional £9m to fund adult social care and a further £4.8m which is ring-fenced work with partners around services like hospital discharges.

“But the £9m will be swallowed by the rise in the National Minimum Wage, which will cost the authority £10m,” said Coun Molyneux.

“We get annual demand pressure for adult social care because Wigan has the fastest ageing population in Greater Manchester. We have more people in the 85-plus age bracket than anywhere else [in the city region].”

Since 2010 Wigan has frozen its council tax in six other years, making it the lowest charging authority in Greater Manchester.

Coun Molyneaux said: “We wanted to protect our people, but because of the way the Government has calculated the settlement we are being headlocked into increasing our council tax by the maximum.”

Coun Nazia Rehman, portfolio holder for resources, finance and transformation, said there would be no dip into reserves to cover any deficit.

She said: “We look after our budget very proactively and prudently. Prevention and early intervention is one of our unique selling points.

“We are trying to address our lack of housing, adult social care, children’s social care. These are all included in our prevention and early intervention. That all forms part of the Wigan Deal – our transformation programme for the last decade.”

The council is also set to approve capital expenditure for the year ahead of £201.57m.

This includes £65.4m earmarked for regeneration, £59.1m to run its housing revenue account, £6.6m on roads, and £23m on children’s an young people’s facilities.

Capital receipts are estimated at £10.7m from activities like asset disposals, some £65.5m comes in in grants and a further £17.5m is gleaned from contributions from developers in Section 106 agreements.

A further £27.38 is drawn from capital reserves and £12.38m from the revenue account while the council borrows £67.6m in financing needed for the year.