Where does your money go? 2023-2024 Budget Campaign

Why are we doing this?

Do you know what the council does? Do you know what different council services cost to run each year?

As part of our commitment to making how the council operates and what things cost more transparent, we are running a project to highlight:

• Key services the council provides, including the ones that everyone knows about (such as waste collections) as well as some less well-known but equally as important services
• The costs of running some key services, including the ones that are most commonly talked about such as waste services and highways maintenance

Why is this important?

75% of the Council's core funding comes from Welsh Government grants, but the amount that the Council is given each year is not enough to meet the rising costs of delivering services.

So far, the Council has managed to protect services by carefully managing them and this has allowed us to keep council tax raises to a minimum. For example, for 2023-24 we raised council tax by 3.8%. If we were to only use council tax payments to cover all of our budget shortfall at the start of 2023-24, we would have needed to raise council tax by 21%

We are expecting to continue to receive less money in real terms from the Welsh Government every year, and we will soon be working out how we will manage our budget for the year 2024-25.

What do we want to know?

Before we consult formally on our budget, it is important that we understand what you know about the essential services we provide, and what they cost.

We know from other work (including recent work developing our Public Participation Strategy) that the services people are most aware about the Council providing are:

• Waste collections
• Highways maintenance
• Education / schools

These are important and visible services, however they are just a very small percentage of the things that the Council works hard to deliver every day.

We would like to invite you to take part in a short (and hopefully fun) quiz so we can understand what you know. This will help us to plan future budget consultations.

Quick Quiz: How much do you know about the council? (link opens in new window)

Thanks for taking part!

Location:

• Start date 27 July 2023
• End date 10 September 2023
• Methods
• Supplier Denbighshire County Council

What we found out

What difference has it made?