THERE has been considerable debate in the media over the past few days about the possibility that Central Government will allow local authorities to make an additional increase in council tax next year to help pay for the cost of adult social care, writes DAVID RENARD.

Last year, the Government gave councils the option to raise tax by two per cent.

However, the scale of the problem means we need a much wider debate about how, as a society, we fund care programmes, as the sums involved are quite staggering.

Our revenue budget is £135m for the current financial year (2016-17). This year’s two per cent increase raised an additional £1.5m; however even with this extra money we still have to find £4.5m of savings out of almost £20m the council must save to balance the budget.

Raising council tax alone will not help solve all our problems. Each additional one per cent produces about £800,000 extra in tax, but we would need a five per cent increase just to avoid the £4.5m savings in adult social care, and even then we would still have to make cuts in every other area.

Asking the Government for more money is not a realistic option either. Central Government has to restore fiscal responsibility to the nation’s public finances after the reckless high spending from 2001 to 2008 left the country exposed to the banking crisis.

For the Government to give councils more money for adult care there would have to be cuts to other public services or tax increases.

Given that welfare benefits, pensions and health alone make up about 58 per cent of all government spending, you can see that any cuts would have to come from these areas.

Tax increases will put more pressure on those with low or fixed incomes, but it would also take money out of the economy and so reduce the commercial success of shops, cafes and other businesses. If companies are not doing as well, there are fewer jobs and that means less people playing income tax.

For the long term, we might need an honest debate about creating private health insurance schemes, which would put more pressure on younger and successive generations to save. In addition, it would not ease the current funding shortage.

We might want to change the debate and ask what we could do as community members, whether as neighbours, concerned citizens, members of faith groups or voluntary or charitable bodies to assist people to live independently for longer.

I do not have easy solutions to offer as it is a complex issue.

All I can hope is that we can have a wider debate about what alternatives there could be.