01/03/2026
ℹ️ South Tyneside Council’s Medium-Term Financial Plan (2026–2030) was passed by full council on Thursday, what happened and what’s changing?
This was after 23 councillors voted for (all Labour) and 23 councillors against (all opposition). After it came to a tie, the deputy mayor (Cllr Smith, former Labour and now ungrouped independent) voted to pass the budget.
✂️ The Breakdown of the "Short-Term" Savings:
📚 Children’s Day Care & Family Hubs (-£1,015,000): These services are the frontline of prevention. Reducing capacity here doesn't make the need go away; it just ensures that when those families eventually hit a crisis point, the cost to the taxpayer will be significantly higher.
📈 Connexions (-£80,000) & Adult Learning (-£232,000): In a borough fighting for regeneration, cutting the very services that get young people and adults into the workforce is counter-intuitive. Skilled, working residents grow our tax base. Cutting this is effectively capping our own economic growth.
🚨 Public Protection & Regulatory Services (-£179,000): These teams are already stretched thin. Every £1 spent on regulatory inspections typically saves the community multiple times that in health, safety, and justice costs. Reducing enforcement capacity is an open invitation for ASB and environmental issues to worsen.
🧹 Streetscene & Highways (-£298,000): We see it every year. Cutting maintenance budgets for roads and cleanliness is a "saving" on paper only. The reality? A spike in insurance claims for vehicle damage and personal injury, alongside a decline in the "curb appeal" that brings businesses to our high streets. StreetScene are responsible for keeping our streets clean, and labour have slashed this budget year on year, while simultaneously campaigning for cleaner streets. This should be called out, our streets are not cleaned for free by pixies (if only!).
🔍 The Bottom Line on these ‘Savings’
A budget should be a roadmap for a sustainable future, not just a desperate scramble to balance the current quarter. By slashing the services that keep people healthy, skilled, and safe, we are simply deferring a much larger bill to the next few years.
We are looking at over £1.8m in cuts specifically targeted at prevention and early intervention. From an economic perspective, this is high-risk; you save a pound today only to spend five pounds tomorrow on emergency statutory services.
🫵 The Cost to You
🔺 Council Tax: Up by 4.95% (£3.96m).
🔺 Social Housing Rents: Up by an average of 4.8% (£3.45m).
🔺 Stealth Charges: "Reviews" are currently underway for all areas of the council. We will also see increases in green waste charges, car parking charges, bereavement services, and garage rents. With some of these increases, the amounts are undisclosed.
When any organisation restructures, there should be a clear plan for operational resilience. In this budget, we see:
❌ No clear data on redundancy costs.
❌ No consultation timescales.
❌ No assessment of how these "reviews" will hit our already stretched operational capacity.
⚠️ The Reserve Risk
Without transparency on these internal reviews, we are essentially guessing at the outcome. The "best-case scenario" is that these cuts are only a portion of the real total. The "worst-case scenario" is that we deplete our limited reserves to cover inefficiencies, leaving the Council financially exposed and potentially going bust.
We are being told that the "Fair Funding Review" and broken promises from central government have left us with no choice. While the funding model is indeed broken, hiking taxes without showing a clear, data-driven plan for internal efficiency is not the standard our residents deserve.
Residents are being asked to dig deeper into their pockets during a cost-of-living crisis, but the budget remains remarkably vague on how that extra revenue will be used to improve efficiency within the Town Hall and council operations.
I also want to address the "missing" alternative budget. We have come under fire from the ruling group for not putting forward an alternative set of numbers, but there is a very simple reason for that: You cannot build a responsible budget on a foundation of secrets.
Why there was no amendment:
❌ Refused Access to Data: We were refused access to the financial modelling and the actual line-by-line costs.
❌ Lack of Transparency: The draft budget was kept from us until it entered the public domain just a few weeks ago.
❌ Quality Standards: Any budget based on limited data is simply not the standard our residents deserve. We refused to "tweak" a flawed document just for the sake of political theatre.
The "Bidding War" Failure 😣
A major part of the problem is the current funding model. Councils are forced to "squabble" over small pots of government money with incredibly narrow criteria. This leads to nonsensical outcomes:
🙋♂️ We may only need £250k to resurface a crumbling road.
🤷♂️ However, the only available government grant might be for £3m to install a bus lane or widen a certain cycle path along the coast road.
🤦♂️To get any money at all, the Council is forced to deliver projects that aren't the best value for money or the highest local priority.
The current funding model is fundamentally broken. We need a system that grants councils true autonomy over their budgets, allowing them to reinvest any underspend into new projects rather than being penalised for efficiency. Currently, the "use it or lose it" approach perversely rewards underspending by clawing back the surplus.
This is exactly why cutting department headcount is a strategic error; those funding applications don't write themselves. With departments already stretched to capacity, if bids are low quality, submitted late, or missed entirely due to a lack of officer time, the whole community loses out.
What happened on Thursday 🏛️
What South Tyneside needs isn’t a few minor adjustments to a failing plan; we need a fundamental shift in policy and mindset. That is the job of a ruling party, but when everyone else is cut out of the room, you are left with a budget built in a vacuum.
We could have had a different outcome on Thursday. If the budget had not been agreed, an emergency general meeting would have been scheduled for the following week. This would have forced the ruling group to finally get around the table with the opposition to build something transparent. However, that opportunity was lost when the Deputy Mayor tipped the scales in Labour's direction.
Why didn’t we back the Green Amendment? 🤷♂️
So firstly, I noted a number of Labour councillors referring to the Green amendment as an alternative budget, to clear this up, the Greens put an amendment to the substantive budget. Nearly everything I have mentioned in the post was left unchanged. Now every councillor will have their own reasons, but for me, some of the cuts proposed by Labour were simply non-negotiable. When we ran the numbers, the amendment adjusted just 0.093% of the overall budget, meaning we would have accepted over 99.9% of the original proposal in real terms.
Do I blame the greens for this? Absolutely not, they encountered the same issues as we did surrounding information sharing. Although, I do question their motivations on why they risked allowing the majority of the Labour budget to get accepted, even when they later spoke against parts they would have adopted automatically if their amendment had been successful.
📣 Final word
We don’t need "tweaks" to a broken budget; we need a cross-party, transparent approach that values generating revenue through innovation rather than just slashing services and hiking taxes.
South Tyneside deserves a budget built on data and transparency, not silence and best-case scenarios, and that’s why I was one of 23 opposition councillors to vote against our latest budget.
