From Aberdeenshire Council communications team
ABERDEENSHIRE Council have launched an online survey detailing some of the tough budget choices that may have to be made to help balance the books – including changing, reducing or stopping various services, council tax increases and looking at the delivery model for Stonehaven Open Air Pool.
The local authority provides hundreds of services to residents every day – from schools, roads, waste, advice to businesses, leisure, culture and benefits. These come with significant budgets but also come with a legal requirement to deliver a range of local services. Serving a population of 263,000 people across a wide geographical spread, our budget is coming under increasing challenge.
In 2024/25, we spent around £750m delivering essential local services and committed £95m on capital projects investing in our infrastructure, schools, buildings, roads and IT estate.
Aberdeenshire, like all councils in Scotland, is under increasing financial pressure. This is due to a range of challenges being experienced by the wider public sector, less money to support local services. Costs are increasing and demands are growing.
Residents will remember previous budget engagement programmes and, over the past few years, we have looked at every part of what we do to remove non-essential spend, stripped out management costs, introduced vacancy management, reduced roads and winter maintenance, changed services in schools, maximised income in areas like our sports facilities, negotiated hard on all our contracts, closed service points and redirected customers to online or telephone support.
But sadly, all this is not enough. For the next financial year (2025-26), current forecasts suggest a position of being £26m over budget.
A list of ideas for further reductions and cuts in services have been drawn up. It is recognised these won’t be popular, but they are things we know we need do to protect our most critical services and our most vulnerable citizens. And we want to know how our communities feel about them.
As well as asking for views on savings, there is a section asking questions about Council Tax. The tax itself brings in around 20% of our income – meanwhile every 1% we collect raises approximately an additional £1.69m, which we will use to protect the services you value the most.
The results of this survey will be pulled together and given to councillors for them to consider at the November meeting of Full Council. They will then continue to debate and consider ideas up to the budget-setting meeting in the first part of 2025.
The survey is now live, and we would love to hear what you think before 15 Nov. That allows us to give councillors an early heads-up on the results for that November meeting. Of course, we can accept later updates too, and paper copies of this can also be accessed in libraries or service points.
https://engage.aberdeenshire.gov.uk/aberdeenshire-council-budget-engagement-2025-26