Council tax in Liverpool to protect social care

Liverpool City Council has stated that it is set to spend the majority of this year’s increase in council tax on services for the most vulnerable.

Of the proposed 5.99 per cent rise, the council says that a total of four per cent will be set aside to fund increases in spending on adult and children’s services to deal with growing demand.

Moreover, an additional £6 million is being found for children’s services, which will also help fund the recruitment of more social workers to deal with increasingly complex cases of young people coming in to care.

Mayor of Liverpool Joe Anderson said: “Our total income from council tax doesn’t even cover the cost of our spend on adult social care and with rising demand as more people live for longer we are struggling to keep up. We are also battling a growing crisis in children’s social care as more families find themselves on the edge due to welfare reform.

“Big cities like Liverpool which have the greatest needs have been clobbered again and again by government since 2010 and we urgently need a fundamental review of the way in which local government is funded. By 2020 we will have lost almost two thirds of the budget that we had back in 2010 and this has had a huge impact on our ability to deliver services. We have 3,000 fewer staff, have transferred some buildings and services across to other organisations and have stopped doing some things that were previously part of our work.”

The council tax rise equates to an additional £1.34 per week for Band A households, which make up almost 60 per cent of the properties in Liverpool.

Despite the cuts, the council is also committing £12 million on services for people who find themselves homeless, £3.5 million shielding 42,000 people from the full impact of government reductions in council tax support, £2.7 million on almost 13,000 crisis payments to help people with the cost of food, fuel, clothing and furniture and £2.2 million on 8,300 Discretionary Housing Payments to people affected by welfare reform and hardship.