Council's budget for next year ready to be approved

The report, which details how much income the council will have and how much it needs to spend on services, is due to be discussed by a meeting of the resources committee on 22 February.

If members of the committee approve the council tax freeze it would mean that council tax would bring in £3.8m, and the council would also receive an extra £80,000 grant from the government. With council tax and the additional grant added to other government funding, the council's income for the next financial year would be just over £8.8m. Even with significant savings of more than £2.3m over the past couple of years, plus an additional £315,000 of savings for the next financial year, the council would still need to spend nearly £9.8m to run local services. The shortfall of nearly a million pounds is likely to be taken out of reserves.

Councillor Paul Bell, leader of Wellingborough Council and chairman of the resources committee said: "We have achieved substantial savings, mainly by reorganising how we do things, but we acknowledge that there's still more to do. Government funding is getting less each year, and we also have to deal with lots of other effects of the downturn in the country's economic fortunes. Low interest rates means we get less return on investments, income from services like planning application fees is reduced because people simply don't have as much money to build or improve their homes, we're getting less rental income from commercial properties and we get less money when we sell land or buildings. But even against that backdrop we're confident we can move forward through these difficult times without affecting public services too much.

"We have to continue to look for ways to save and we're being more and more creative in how we do that. We've already established successful partnerships with other councils for ICT and legal services and we're due to launch Wellingborough Norse next month, which is our joint company for environmental services. We're also looking at ways that more income can be generated, such as the crematorium project that is going through the approval process at the moment. We've had to use around £1m of reserves to balance the books for next year, but we're hopeful that as we find more ways to either save money or bring in more income we can reduce that amount."

A public consultation, including a roadshow in the town centre and letters to more than 150 organisations, ran throughout January to ask people's opinions on the council's priorities and savings proposals. The final budget will be approved at a meeting of the full council on 1 March.