The City's Budget for next year has been finalised

Next year’s budget for the city will be £2.5m more generous thanks to opposition amendments which were approved at the Council’s budget meeting last week.

The additional money comes from the reversal of the minority Tory Council’s proposal to reduce Council tax by 1%. Instead, Council tax next year will be frozen, providing over £1m in additional funding. The Conservatives have also agreed not to go ahead with scrapping a cycle lane in Hove, which would have cost £1.1m.

The additional funds will be used for:

• drug and alcohol abuse prevention work, youth offending - keeping more young people out of the criminal justice system
• older people's personal care
• community development and support that will benefit 24 separate neighbourhoods across the city
• more money for school budgets
• additional money for the Connexions careers advice and guidance service
• maintaining the anti-bulling and equality work with schools that focuses on discrimination
• funding to keep subsidized bus routes going for another year
• running a food waste collection pilot
• preventing the 30% cut to the council's music service
• funding for a citywide debt advice, anti-loan shark financial inclusion strategy that includes additional support for the Credit Union and existing money advice services.

And we also put money back into reserves, giving us more options for future years.

The amendments, which took over five hours to be passed, were finalized when the Conservatives voted in favour of the amended budget and Labour abstained. The Greens voted against the budget, which means that they voted against all the above amendments as well, many of which were jointly proposed by them. If all opposition parties had voted against, all the amendments would have been lost and we would have been left with no budget and only a week to go before the deadine by which Councils are legally required to pass a budget.

Cuts to local government funding - imposed nationally by the coalition government -means that the city will face difficult times next year. But Labour Councillors will continue to work hard to minimize the effects of these cuts on the city and on the most vulnerable people. The budget amendments are an example of this in practice.