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Like many councils across the country, we are experiencing increasing demand – particularly in adult social care and children’s services. This is compounded by falling central government funding along with increasing costs of delivering services.
We currently have 2,581 adults in North Somerset who need our help to care for them at home or in residential settings. The cost of providing these services over the year is £120.7m – an average of £46,764 a person.
The total number of children in care has also increased by 47 per cent over the last three years, and the cost of providing care has increased.
The average cost to care for a child in residential care for a week is about £10,000, compared with about £6,500 a week last year.
The government’s upcoming ‘Fair Funding Review’ is also expected to reduce our funding by over £17 million, a cut of nearly 20 per cent. At the same time, we have the second lowest council tax base in the South West, meaning we cannot raise enough income locally to offset these pressures.
Despite making difficult savings decisions over the last decade, we are still facing a budget pressure in the current year exceeding £11 million and our forecast budget gap for 2026/27 has now risen to £25.9 million - more than double earlier projections.
Along with service wide transformation and leaving no stone unturned in a bid to make council-wide savings, we’re calling on the government to urgently fix a broken local government funding system.
We have written to the Chancellor and our MPs and will continue to lobby for fair funding and local flexibility.
For more information, visit our website.