With inflation at its highest rate for decades, the price of everything is going up and, as you would expect, this has had a huge impact on the council’s finances.

To help close the unprecedented budget gap for the next financial year, some difficult decisions have been taken to help us achieve the £26m savings to balance the budget.

Perhaps the most difficult of all was to raise council tax by 4.99 per cent. It may be half the rate of inflation, but we know local residents are already struggling with sky-high energy and food bills and asking them to pay more for council services is not something I, or any of my fellow councillors, wanted to do.

However, the scale of the financial challenges facing all local authorities, not just Swindon, is so great that it was something we had to do.

Council tax bills will be delivered to 88,000 households from this week and, inside the envelope, you will also notice a brightly coloured booklet that has been deliberately designed to catch your attention.

This booklet sets out how 80 per cent of the council’s day-to-day budget pays for a relatively small proportion of adults and children who require support.

Social care is extremely expensive and within the booklet, you will find examples of how much it costs to provide support to children and adults who really need our help.

It cost £21.6m, for example, last year to place an average of 265 children in care placements, we spent £27.8m on providing residential or nursing care for 567 people, and £15.6m paid for supported living care for 194 people.

These are staggering sums of money, but not entirely surprising when you see that an average care package for an adult costs £24,365 a year and the cost of providing a care placement for a child costs £81,300 on average per year.

This is vital support, which would not be possible without the contributions you make to the council in council tax.

Inside the booklet there are a number of heart-warming case studies, which describe just how this support is making a real difference to people’s lives and is definitely worth a read if you can spare just a few minutes.

If you read the booklet, you will see that the council’s net budget for next year is £166.4m with council tax making up 75 per cent (£125.4m) of that total. The remainder of the day-to-day budget comes from business rates collected locally (£35.8m) and government grants (£5.2m).

Of that net budget, more than half (£84.2m) will be spent on adult services with a further 29.1 per cent (£48.4m) being spent on children, families and community health services.