Plans to mothball three museums, axe all Bristol City Council funding for cultural groups and slash £3.4million from council tax benefits for the poorest families have been put on hold. And proposed charges for disabled car parking bays have been abandoned altogether from a long list of options to save money and balance the authority’s 2025/26 budget.
The plans to temporarily close Blaise Museum, the Georgian House and Red Lodge, along with cutting all funding in the cultural investment programme for the city’s creative organisations, had been met with anger from performing arts trade union Equity. The council’s £635,000 grant support would have been phased out completely over the next three years.
Both ideas will now be deferred by 12 months so a cross-party culture working group can explore alternative funding options before any decisions are made.
The proposed £3.4million cuts to the Council Tax Reduction Scheme (CTRS), which helps the poorest households with discounts of up to 100 per cent of the bill, has also been dropped from the 2025/26 budget while another working group consults with organisations such as ACORN and Citizens Advice on how the local authority can best support low-income families, including looking at the CTRS.
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A report to the strategy and resources committee, which will discuss the draft budget on Monday, February 3, before a final decision at full council on February 25, said: “Latest budget estimates indicate that this scheme will cost £44.1million, assisting almost 31,500 households.”
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Bristol City Council leader Cllr Tony Dyer (Green, Southville) said that although some of the options on the original long list of cost-cutting proposals had been removed or deferred for further work, the authority still needed to make £43million of savings.
But he said the £571.1million general fund budget, for day-to-day spending, would also include £75million to invest in growing services in different areas of the council to meet demand.
Cllr Dyer said: “The financial plans being shared in the draft budget include capital investment programmes that set out over £406million of potential spending next year across council services.
“This includes investing in the physical aspects of the city – building new homes, raising standards in existing council housing, repairing roads and bridges, introducing new cycle and walkways, and putting funding into our school buildings.
“Our primary goal remains balancing our finances to ensure we don’t face the fate of so many other councils who have had decisions on where to spend their money taken out of their hands by government.
“Closing the £52million financial gap we forecast next year is critical but how we do that is just as important.”
He said the budget would be balanced over two years instead of the legal requirement of just one.
Cllr Dyer said: “We’ve talked about savings but we are also making significant investment, by which I mean additional investment on top of what we’re already doing.
“There is £20million going into adults and communities, another £28million going to children and education, and an additional £15m going to growth and regeneration.
“By being able to do those investments, some of those will save us money further down the line.”