News: Jason KitCat

Brighton and Hove City Council leader Jason Kitcat on the new city budget

The dust has settled and a council budget has been set for another year. While it wasn’t the budget I
was hoping for, a compromise had to be found. Brighton & Hove is in its 12th year of being a council in no overall control, and negotiation has had to play a large part of the decision-making in that time.
The parties’ political differences remain, but the legal duty of setting a budget to ensure services could continue had to be paramount in finding a way forward. Letting the budget fail and leaving it to central government to set would have been a dereliction of duty, leaving many to wonder why they bothered voting in council elections.

While some one-off money was agreed to delay cuts to some politically sensitive issues like children’s centres, the fundamental challenges remain: local public services cannot carry on as they are in the face of rising costs, growing population and people living longer than ever. We also have a tax base which has been falling ever behind inflation due to freezes and capped increases. Finally we have the very significant year on year cuts in our government funding on which we depend far more than councils in the rest of the developed world.

This month the council will be setting out its corporate plan on how it will face those challenges ahead. The plan will require the agreement of councillors at a full council meeting. Its success will depend on the collaboration, creativity and dedication of everyone in the city, whether using or delivering public services. No longer can we sit back and assume that public service is done by ‘them over there’ for us. Keeping our city working and its residents healthy and safe is a collective endeavour for all of us.