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Saving plan hit by funding gap
A council has revealed it will not be able to save as much money this year as it had hoped after being left facing a multi-million pound funding gap.
The Conservative administration at Northamptonshire County Council has said a combination of less houses being built in the county than expected and a drop in the numbers of people paying council tax, means it will receive 2.5m less from council tax than it had planned for.
The council's cabinet member for finance, Cllr Bill Parker, said: "Over the past year, we've seen the building industry come to a virtual standstill because of the recession so the number of new houses we expected to see built has been a lot less than we thought it would be.
"There's also less money being collected from taxpayers, but whether that's due to the recession and people being made redundant, we don't know, but there has been a significant fall in the amount of money being collected."
As part of the council's draft budget proposals for next year the authority had planned to put aside about 3m to put into its savings for the future.
But now the authority has had to put those plans on hold so it can use the money to make up the balance.
Cllr Parker said: "We were going to put 3m into reserves and we can't do that now.
"The whole situation puts both us under greater pressure and unfortunately the council taxpayers who can pay and it puts more pressure on services."
Cllr Parker also confirmed the Conservatives intend to stick to their plans to put up council tax by 3.5 per cent.
Council tax payments for the county council are collected by the district and borough councils across Northamptonshire.
Cllr Parker said the smaller councils work on a collection rate of 98.4 per cent but were not achieving that.
The county council's cabinet will discuss the authority's latest budget plans at a meeting in county hall this afternoon.
The final budget plans will be approved during a meeting of the full council later this month.
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Friday 10 February 2012
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