Councillors narrowly vote against tax reduction

The amount of money residents pay a parish council was under review at a recent meeting of Wrockwardine Parish Council.

The precept is the  money added to council tax to operate parish and town council services at a local level.  Often this money is spent on community projects, bus shelters, operating community centres and street lighting.

There were proposals on the table to implement  either a 10% reduction in the precept, or to keep it the same as last year.

But concern from the chair, Cllr Cooper, is that Wrockwardine Parish Council is ‘reducing our slice of cake’ when other Councils are agreeing a 5% increase. and shortfalls would be passed onto the new council following the governance review.

The results from the governance review were announced recently by Telford & Wrekin Council following a lengthy consultation and will mean some redrawing of boundaries affecting Wrockwardine Parish Council.

A reduction in the number of households following the redrawing of the boundaries could put the new entity in a more difficult financial position.  

Cllr Thomas said  he would support actually reducing the precept by 10% to help residents with cost of living. He said “It’s a small number pound-wise, but its the right thing to do.”

Cllr Parr agreed ‘The council sets the precept based on planned spending and there are no big investments planned.’

The chair said ‘We can afford to do it’.

Cllr Davies told the meeting that he would prefer the precept to stay as it is: “There will be a reduction passed on to the new council’ if the precept was reduced.  

Cllr K Ballantyne agreed with Cllr Davies and considered what the council could with reserves in place instead; “We could look at solar lighting…if its something that the people want, we should do it now.”

The chair took the decision to a vote and a narrow decision was made to have no increase in the precept, rather than a reduction with five votes in favour.