Birmingham City Council has warned it must make cuts of £300m more by 2018, saying next year’s budget will be the ‘hardest’ yet.
The council has published a Green Paper setting out the future role and purpose of the authority. As part of this process it has ranked its services against four criteria to show which services are most at risk.
Child protection, public health and care services have been ranked as high priority, with services such as pest control and careers advice falling into the low priority category.
Leader of the council, Sir Albert Bore said: ‘As you will be aware, Birmingham City Council has been dealing with the challenge of significant funding cuts since 2010. As this green paper shows, we have already made over £460m of cuts over that period and we face around £315m or so of cuts before 2018.
As cuts continue year after year, it becomes more and more difficult to identify savings without reducing or closing services that are valuable to Birmingham people.
‘Next year’s budget (for 2015–16) is proving to be the hardest yet.’
The review sets out radical changes to the way services are delivered, further reductions in the workforce and plans for council tax increases.
