Budget Engagement for 2025/26

Aberdeenshire Council provides hundreds of services to residents every day – from schools, roads, waste, advice to businesses, leisure, culture and benefits. Earlier this year, the Council agreed a new Council Plan and Priorities and will now focus our activity on A Sustainable Economy, Living Well Locally and Connected Communities.

Whether it’s investment in our school buildings, promoting business support, providing industrial units, roads maintenance and active travel routes, leisure activities, educating our children and young people, investing in our Foundation Apprenticeship Programme, everything will support better outcomes under one or more of those Priorities.

To support that, the Council will focus on place – really understanding the impact of these priorities on our villages and towns and how can we work alongside our communities to help achieve your aspirations. We have also embarked on an ambitious transformation programme, driving down costs and doing things differently so we can direct our precious and limited resources to where they will have the greatest impact.

Our Budget

Aberdeenshire Council spends millions of pounds every year in your communities, on your behalf. In 2024/25, we spent £753m delivering essential local services and committed £95m on capital projects investing in our infrastructure, schools, buildings, roads and IT estate. We also spend a further £57m on council housing, including sheltered and very sheltered housing. To learn more about where our budget comes from and how it is spent, click here: Our Budget | Budget Engagement for 2025/26 | Engage Aberdeenshire

The challenge we face

Aberdeenshire Council, like all councils in Scotland, is under increasing financial pressure. This is due to a range of challenges being experienced by the wider public sector. Put simply, there is less money coming from central government to support local services. Costs are increasing and demands are growing. With less money to support local services, it means as a local authority in order to set a balanced budget for the next financial year, difficult decisions need to be made about what we can no longer afford to do.

We also need to use data to project the needs of our communities in the future. We have one of the fastest ageing populations in Scotland – with a 28% increase in people of retirement age and a 37% increase in the population of people aged over 85 from 2018 to 2030. That brings opportunities as well as challenges and will without a doubt impact over the next few years on care services. Over 70% of our entire budget supports education and care.

We realise that we are changing, and communities are changing too. That is why council finances budgeting is so complex. The picture is never the same – changing school rolls, ageing population, ageing infrastructure, emergencies and weather events. We need to be different, and our communities need different things from us at different times.

We have a council plan which sets out quite clearly what we want to achieve. But there are many hundreds of other services which are valued by communities which will inevitably have to change or stop altogether in order for us to balance the books. This isn’t new. Over the last few years, we have looked at every part of what we do to reduce costs, we’ve stripped out management costs, introduced vacancy management, reduced roads and winter maintenance, changed services in schools, maximised income in areas where we are able to charge for services, we’ve negotiated hard on all our contracts, closed service points and redirected customers to online or telephone support.

But sadly, all this is not enough. For 2025-26 we’re currently forecasting an out of budget position of around £26m. We are working up a range of ideas for further reductions and cuts in services. We know these won’t be popular but they are things we know we need do to protect our most critical services and our most vulnerable citizens. Part of the funding we generate is through Council Tax – this makes up around 20% of our income and is a charge placed on every household to contribute to the payment of local services. Every 1% we collect in Council Tax raises approximately an additional £1.69m in income, which we will use to protect the services you value the most.

Balancing the Books

In order to live within our means, we will continue to drive efficiencies, change the way services are delivered, work closely with communities to support them to do more for themselves or stop things altogether. The kind of things we are looking at doing next year to reduce costs are set out in the survey attached and we would like to hear your views on those. Simply click on the survey link below to have your say. We will provide an update to Councillors on 21 November, but the survey will remain open until 5pm on Friday 20 December 2024.