Reform-led Nottinghamshire County Council will not be putting up council tax by the maximum amount – but a significant sum in reserve cash will be used to help balance its budget.
The authority will be putting council tax up by 3.99 per cent, lower than the maximum allowed amount of 4.99 per cent.
Cllr Mick Barton, the council’s leader, said the rise was one of the lowest in a decade, but admitted it would add more pressure to the administration to pull off its savings plan.
“We have always said we will try and keep council tax as low as we can,” he told the Local Democracy Reporting Service (LDRS).
“There is a lot of hard work ahead of us.
“We have already made a promise to deliver £45.2 million of savings over our administration. So with doing this we are adding a little bit more pressure to ourselves. We are not making it easier for ourselves but we are trying to do what is right for the public.
“It is one of the lowest in 10 years that we are delivering. It does add pressures, but we know we can deliver it.”
However, to set a balanced budget in the next financial year, which begins in April 2026, the authority will be using £4.2 million from its reserves.
The council’s finance director Nigel Stevenson said the reserves would be “borrowed” and paid back the following year.
All councils hold cash reserves back for a rainy day, allowing them to better respond to uncertainty around future government funding and increasing demand and costs in adult and children’s services.
While not bound by any regulations, many councils, including Middlesborough and Nottingham, consider 7.5 per cent of the authority’s entire revenue budget to be a good amount of reserves.
Nottingham, for example, has reserves of around £63 million, which equates to around 18 per cent of its entire budget.
The county council currently has £36 million in spare cash – not allocated for other things – in its reserves.
But this is less than 7.5 per cent of its entire £875.7 million budget – as 7.5 per cent would equate to more than £65 million.
The Local Government Association (LGA) says councils often come under pressure to use reserves to plug ongoing budget gaps, “but using reserves is not the solution to the financial pressures councils are facing”.
But Cllr Barton said: “Why tax the public again? The Government is doing that.
“Just because you can doesn’t mean you have to do it. It is a hard decision, it is quite a few million quid you’ve got to find, but we think it sends a message out that we are trying to act on the people’s behalf, and we don’t think it is right to keep taxing them.”
Cllr Sam Smith, of the Conservative opposition group, said Reform had gone back on pledges from Arnold North councillors John Semens and Wendy Lukacs before they were elected.
A campaign leaflet from the pair noted three issues that they believed were “important to highlight” – including a freeze on council tax.
“Reform councillors were absolutely clear before the election — they told residents that a vote for Reform was a vote for their council tax to be cut or frozen,” Cllr Smith said.
“Instead, they’ve delivered a £20 million tax rise. This is a blatant breach of trust with Nottinghamshire residents, and people are right to feel angry about it.”
Cllr Barton told the LDRS he had never personally put out literature campaigning for a freeze on council tax.
According to the council’s finance director, Mr Stevenson, they are still anticipating a budget gap of £5.8 million in the current financial year, which ends in March, but he said he is “confident we will close that”.
By 2027/28 the council is then hoping it will have a £12.3 million surplus, and a £19.6 million surplus the following year, bringing the total surplus over the next three years to £31.9 million, subject to its significant multimillion-pound efficiencies programme being successful.
This, Mr Stevenson said, could allow the council to invest more in vital services.
“It is a clear demonstration we will continue with that sound financial management,” he continued.
Stuart Matthews, the council’s cabinet member for finance, added: “Reform got voted into this council, the biggest political revolution in 100 years, people wanted changes.
“We’ve got a responsibility to show we are different, to make this not the Nottinghamshire way, but the efficiency way. We would have loved to have given a zero per cent increase, but where do we find £25.8 million from?”
Pressures on its budget persist in adult and children’s services.
The authority currently has 900 children in its care, 12,700 adults in full-time care and 4,600 adults in temporary care.
Cllr Barton said the authority has been seeking efficiencies in these areas, including looking to boost foster carer numbers by 100 to bring children out of costly care placements and into “loving homes”.
“We are not cutting any staff, not cutting any services,” Cllr Barton said.
“We are going to be improving the way we do things under the efficiencies programme.
“This is a very positive budget. We are putting extra pressure on ourselves to deliver this. We want to make a big difference.”
But he said he would not be going into the exact details of the efficiencies yet.
The authority said it is planning investment totalling £374 million from its budgets and grant funding on things such as road maintenance, schools and adult social care.
Budget papers published on Wednesday (January 21) claim spending in the council’s roads maintenance and renewals programme in 2025/26 is expected exceed £50m “which reflects the highest ever spend on this programme”.
