Have your say on the council's budget priorities

To support delivery of the council’s four-year Corporate Plan, the council sets its budget each year stating how much money there is to spend and what the funds will be spent on. 

This year is particularly challenging, and urgent work is being undertaken to help balance the budget. Current forecasts show the council must make total savings of more than £53m over the next three years. 

North Somerset residents and stakeholders are invited to participate in an online budget development survey at https://n-somerset.inconsult.uk/budget202526/consultationHome from today until closing date Friday 22 November, 5pm. 

The survey asks residents for their key priorities, issues they are concerned with, what they’d particularly like to prioritise for investment and improvement, what level of council tax increase they would support in the coming year and their preferred approach for delivering council services.

This year, for the first time, there is also a budget simulator where residents can ‘build your own budget’ to make the £53 million saving. Residents can experiment with various budget options and see the likely impact of their choices on the services we deliver.

The council will also be holding a series of workshops over the coming months to run through the budget simulator and your ideas for where they could make savings and/or increase income and help balance the budget. 

Councillor Mike Bell, Leader of the Council, will be hosting the workshops and will be joined by members of the Executive and council officers. If you are interested in attending one of these in-person workshops, please join our Citizen's Panel.

Alternatively, the council is hosting two 'budget drop in' sessions which are open to all residents and partners. No need to book, please just drop by.

• Thursday 7 November between 5.30pm and 7pm at the Town Hall in Weston-super-Mare. Please arrive at the library reception and a council officer will meet you there. 
• Thursday 14 November between 5.30pm and 7pm at North Somerset Council’s ‘Castlewood’ office in Clevedon. Please arrive at reception and a council officer will meet you there. 

Here residents will be able to meet council staff, talk through the survey and answer any questions they may have.

Councillor Mike Bell, Leader of North Somerset Council said: “We’d like everyone across North Somerset to take part in our budget development engagement and let us know their views and priorities by the closing date of Friday 22 November, 5pm. Your feedback is invaluable and will help inform our budget. Like many councils across the country, we’re facing an unprecedented financial challenge. After years of austerity and reductions in government funding, we quite simply don’t have enough income to cover our forecast expenditure. We are going to have to make tough decisions and your feedback will help us know your priorities.

“We are trying to do more than ever to inform and involve residents and partners in this process and help us to tackle these issues together. This is why this year we’ve launched both a survey and an innovative budget simulator to give residents a voice. We will also be running dedicated sessions with panels of our residents to work together through the challenges and options we have.

“We cannot promise to deliver everything that our residents ask for or might want, but we will use the results of this work to inform our decisions. Good decisions are the result of working together and I would urge everyone to engage and have a say.” 

A budget update, including the engagement session feedback, will be presented at the next Executive meeting on Wednesday 4 December. 

Proposed savings plans will be shared in December ahead of final budget discussions in February.