Harringay, Haringey - So Good they Spelt it Twice!

Council Tax Rise on the Way......and (with a sheepish grin) Happy New Year!

Haringey Council is looking to increase its council tax for the first time in nine years to help deal with increasing budget pressures.

They are proposing to increase council tax by 2.99%. They calculate that this will result in an additional £3m. This will increase a typical household's council tax bill by around £50 a year. The Council Tax Relief Scheme will be increased to 100% for the borough's least well-off families with children.

Even with this increase, Haringey estimate a need to reduce the budget by around £19.6 million next year. Some of the reductions will come from new proposals being consulted upon in a current consultation (see below) These will amount to £7m rising to £13m when fully implemented.

The Council say that even after these reductions and the tax rise, they forecast a need to find a further £18m - £26m of cuts in future years.

Last month, Communities Secretary James Brokenshire outlined the provisional legal government funding settlement for 2019-2020, in which he confirmed councils will be able to up tax rates by up to the legal threshold of 4.99 percent.

This 4.99 percent is made up of 2.99 percent for the general local authority budget and a further two percent which must be allocated to social care.

Read more about the changes in the attached pdf. You can respond to the consultation on the changes by printing this out or online.

Download Haringey Document: Budget Consultation 2019.pdf

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Permalink Reply by DTW on January 1, 2019 at 11:25

So the council aren’t going down the referendum route? What a shame. The one decent thing the new lot proposed and they’ve bottled it.

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Permalink Reply by Roger on January 1, 2019 at 21:01

... a referendum would need authorisation from the Secretary of State, James Brokenshire, whose approval would be unlikely...

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Permalink Reply by Roger on January 1, 2019 at 20:40

... if the Haringey reserves fall below a certain level external auditors would be brought in by central government to run borough services... as happened last year in Tory run Nottingham... Haringey don't have multiple millions...