COUNCIL tax is set to rise by five per cent next year as Swindon Borough Council continues to face the mounting cost of adult social care in the face of reduced funding from Westminster.

The cabinet will vote next week on budget proposals which will see the average household asked to pay an extra £59.47 a year.

As it plans for 2017/18, the council will have in mind that it is set to finish 2016/17 having overspent by £6.5m – the cost of providing care for vulnerable adults in the community made up £4.6m of that figure.

Council leader David Renard said the introduction of the national living wage had caused an increase in the cost of care of around £1.6m just this year, while inflation across the sector was running at four to five per cent.

“People are living longer, both the elderly and those with disabilities,” he said.

“Forecasting and predicting in this area is really difficult and all authorities wrestle with it.

“Successive governments have ducked the issue. There does need to be a national solution, local tax payers can’t keep picking up an ever-increasing share of the cost.”

A new adult social care support grant was recently announced by the Government in response to the crisis.

However the money was taken from the New Homes Bonus, a scheme Swindon had previously benefitted from, resulting in a loss of £855,000 across the board.

Last month it was revealed that after accounting for nearly all the funding required for the coming year, increases in care costs left the council facing a short notice hole in its plans of some £4.2m.

The finance team has managed to plug that hole, but only at the cost of between 80 and 90 council jobs.

The staffing cuts are expected achieve savings of £1.5m, the hope is that compulsory redundancies can be avoided wherever possible.

The coming financial year is likely to be just as challenging as the last — the Government expects councils to be almost entirely self sufficient by 2020 and local authorities are having to make huge savings to achieve that.

Coun Russell Holland, the cabinet member for finance, said: “Over the next three years we’re still going to have to find savings and fundamentally change the way the council operates.

“You can get discouraged by that, or you can accept the reality and do the best you can with it. We’re seeking to stay up beat and ambitious even in these difficult times.”

Coun Holland pointed to the council’s new commercial investment strategy, which has recently seen the acquisition of land at the Delta business park, as a positive moving forward.

Responding to the budget report, Labour’s leader in Swindon said the council must share the blame with the those in Westminster.

“Central government has almost abandoned local authorities on the question of funding,” said Coun Jim Grant.

“But this doesn’t excuse the council in what appears to be financial incompetence in managing to develop a gap of £4m they didn’t know was there two months ago and now having to resort to job cuts to plug that gap.

“This five per cent council tax increase, together with huge increases in parish precepts the Tories have imposed, means that most people in the town will be paying the equivalent of more than 10 per cent more.

“But still the job losses and cuts in services continue. This will hit the poor and the ‘just managing’ the hardest.

“We know now that under the Tories in this town you pay more, but get less.”