LAST night Cabinet reviewed the draft budget for 2017/18 in which we have to make a further £20m of savings on top of the £20m we have to save this year.

While it continues to be a huge task to put the budget together, the efforts of Coun Russell Holland and his officer team mean that the gap is just £471,000 in these proposals.

At this time last year we were still trying to find nearly £3m of savings.

We have been able to achieve this because we are following a strategy to make the council financially sustainable by 2020, when the main central government grant for all local authorities will cease.

At the heart of this strategy is our ongoing transformation of council services.

We have only been able to do this by making the tough decisions now and avoiding the temptation to run down reserves in the hope of maintaining the status quo.

In my opinion, a refusal to make these choices would be unrealistic and a disservice to the people of Swindon.

The headlines make striking reading. We are proposing to increase council tax by 1.99 per cent in addition to the two per cent increase permitted by central government that will be ring-fenced for adult social care.

Since we spend nearly 80 per cent of the council’s revenue budget on personalised care services, you will not see the major proposals you may have seen in previous years.

You can see full details of the draft budget on the Council’s website and from Tuesday, December 13, you can respond to the consultation here: www.swindon.gov.uk/budgetconsultation.

The most significant change, in fact, is in an obscure document called the Mid-Year Treasury Performance report.

What we are doing is slowing down the rate we repay our debt for a few years, just as you might seek a holiday in repaying a mortgage.

As this is local government, we use the phrase, Minimum Revenue Provision.

Make no mistake, this is not going to reduce the total amount we have to repay but it will assist us in achieving our financial strategy.

Whenever we discuss this issue some people have asked why I haven’t written more often to the Prime Minister to ask for more money.

If the Government gives us more, that means either paying higher taxes, less money for other authorities, or cuts in other essential Government services.

There is no pot of money sitting in Whitehall to help us out.

I am fully committed to the current Government’s policies to restore responsible budget management to the nation’s public finances after the excessive spending that occurred from 2001 to 2010.