ERYC Council Tax set at 4.9% due to £7m top sliced for other councils

The council has set a budget for the next financial year (April 1, 2008, to
March 31, 2009) of £244.3 million, which requires a council tax at Band D
of £1,149.46, an increase of £53.69 or 4.9 per cent.

Although Band D is used as the benchmark national average charge for a
householder, more properties in the East Riding fall into the lower bands B
and C.  The council tax at these bands will be  £894.02 and £1,021.74.

Once again, budget setting has been extremely challenging as around four
fifths of all available money comes from fees and charges or government
grant and the council continues to be handicapped from a grant formula that
results in funding at a level considerably below the national average for
similar councils.  The council receives £96 per person less than the
average through the grant system and is also among the worst funded
councils in the country for schools.

Despite a better than average grant settlement from the government for the coming year, the underlying problem of a grant formula that favours larger urban areas at the expense of mainly rural ones like the East Riding,
failing to take proper account of the costs of providing services in
sparsely populated areas, still  remains.

Budget increases for the coming year have mainly been made in response to an increasing demand for services, for meeting the rising costs of existing
commitments, and also the considerable cost of complying with new
government legislative requirements.

Substantial increases have been made to budgets for adult and children's
services to ensure provision for vulnerable people.  Child care services
will receive a 7.2 per cent rise, with a hike of more than £400,000 over
the next two years for the youth service, and there is an 8.7 per cent
growth in the budget for adult services, including the reinvestment of
savings, to protect vulnerable adults.

An increase has been agreed for the waste management budget, in particular to fund the trial in the Driffield and Haltemprice areas of green waste collection, which is important if the council is to meet the tough
recycling target of 45 per cent of waste by 2010.  Failure to do so would
result in increasingly steep government penalties through the landfill tax.

An additional budget allocation has been made to meet the increasing cost