Belper Town Council finances - the facts

If you want to know the truth about how your town or village is run then don't rely on the claims made by those seeking to be elected. A simple but effective truth because the last thing that any political party will do is acknowledge the success of their opponents. Whatever the yardstick, their adversaries will fall short. The opening lines of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice come to mind (please forgive me Austen purists):

St. John's Chapel Belper - Our town hall

“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that an election candidate in possession of a misguided belief in their own infallibility  must be in want of a financial education.”

I suspect that most of you reading this are aware that I am a candidate in an election, now but 3 days away. So do I have a misguided belief? I hope not because financial myths, distortions, downright falsehoods .............. call them what you will, are the province of those who base their campaigns on attacking those they wish to defeat, Thankfully I am a Labour Party member in Belper and we made the decision to campaign on our record and to deal only in facts. Yes that does seem rather sanctimonious but it is far better to let voters decide on facts and once they know the truth they can make their own judgement. The difficulty is trying to get that truth heard against the clamour of what a Trump spokesperson claimed to be "alternative facts".

So what are the facts about Belper Finances

Labour took control of the council in May 2019 and in the 4 years up to April 2023 have a revenue and expenditure account as follows:

All the above information is available on the Belper Town Council Website. The council tax column demonstrates how much of the councils total income is made up of council tax. In the 4 years between 2019 and 2023 the council tax precept paid for 96% of council expenditure. The pandemic limited the amount of income that Belper Town Council would have expected in normal years.

In conclusion 

It has been a difficult but rewarding 4 years. There were some nasty surprises, especially discovering in 2020 that we had to pay tax for our Coppice car park and that there is an anticipated bill for the car park adjacent to St. John's Church, our town hall. It was no surprise that we contributed £100k to the Swiss Tea Room rebuild but it did make a hole in the earmarked reserves which needed to be built back up for future infrastructure expenditures. We trimmed back our general reserve to 37% in light of the cost of living crisis but with inflation still running high in 2023 that reserve is our only buffer to protect future services if we want to keep our town tax at such a low level.

Yes, I write "low level" because, with over 10,200 households in Belper the average Belper Town Council cost per family was, in 2022/23 £1.10 per week or £57 per year. A lot of that money is spent on services that have experienced government cuts in funding via the County and Borough councils. We try to make good the loss of youth services, public transport, arts and culture groups, the Belper Leisure centre and so much more that makes Belper such a great place to live. There is still so much to be done.