Car parking charges to rise as council seeks to balance books

East Riding Council is taking advantage of funding from the Government specifically to freeze council tax for the second year running, but needs to make £15m of savings. It faces a reduction of central Government funding of £34m over five years.

No council facilities will close and annual spending of £22m with the voluntary and community sector will continue. But parking charges are set to rise by five per cent from April, the first rise since August 2010, and cemeteries’ fees and charges will be increased by six per cent a year. Charges for bulky collections will also go up by six per cent.

All household waste recycling sites will close an hour earlier and charges for tickets to leisure centres and attractions like Sewerby Hall will go up to try to bring in an extra £276,000 profit.

At the moment more than 3,000 people living in non-sheltered housing accommodation in the East Riding are given Lifeline buttons, worn around the neck or wrist, allowing them to contact a 24-hour monitoring service. Currently these are provided “regardless of need” but in future they will only be provided to those who meet certain criteria. The move is set to save £400,000 a year from 2014/2015.

A report on the budget which will be set at a council meeting on February 9 says: “Those who do not meet the Fair Access to Care Services criteria will be offered the option to pay for the service or the service to be withdrawn in 2012/2013.”

The charity Home Start which supports struggling families is set to close on April 30, after having its funding of £57,000 cut by the council. Consultation started yesterday over the loss of three part-time jobs at the charity.

Senior coordinator Nicky Wordsworth said they’d sent off over 100 letters trying to raise sums to keep them going while they made a bid for Lottery funding without success: “We are drawing up a plan of action for the families - they are the people we care about. We believe it is very shortsighted because I am pretty confident we provide the best value for money service in the area.”

Unlike other authorities which have had to make hundreds of redundancies, East Riding has only shed 51 jobs so far, with a quarter of staff who lost jobs being redeployed.

Over the next two years there are potentially 170 whole-time equivalent jobs at risk. But council leader Steve Paranby said the final figure “wouldn’t be anywhere near that”.

On the changes to the Lifeline system, he said: “Let’s be clear currently everybody gets them whether they need them or not.

“People will be assessed and if they need them they will get them and if they don’t need them, but actually want them, they will be given the opportunity to pay for them.”

He said they’d been able to avoid the type of cuts seen elsewhere by being “ahead of the game” and making cuts early, adding: “Yes, there will be one or two slight increases, but there will be no increase in council tax whatsoever and no one will notice any difference in services.”

While council tax will be frozen this year, it is set to start rising again next year.

Labour has raised concerns about the use of £4.5m from reserves, including £3.2m from adult services.

Coun Keith Moore said: “In general we are supportive of the proposals because we recognise the difficulty the council is in because of the massive reduction in central Government grant. I would prefer to see a small rise of one per cent in council tax this year because if we continue the way we are going then in three or four years time, the council will find itself with no reserves and having to slash and burn services or put council tax up by a large amount.”