A North Somerset councillor has called for two top members of the council to lose their jobs so their pay can be used to fund an hour’s free parking.
Luke Smith (Clevedon West, Conservative) tabled an amendment as North Somerset Council voted on its budget on February 18, calling for two members of the executive to be removed to help fund an hour’s free parking at several locations in Clevedon where new charges are being introduced by the council. He said: “I can’t, with a clean conscience, not try and further mitigate the parking strategy.”
Council leader Mike Bell (Weston-super-Mare Central, Liberal Democrat) said: “I applaud you for the cheeky amendment quite selflessly putting the interests of your own area first before the rest of the district.” He said he thanked Mr Smith for bringing proposals to the table but added: “It doesn’t add up and doesn’t make sense.”
Mr Bell said: “I’m afraid you can’t delete exec members as that’s in the leader’s constitutional gift to appoint — so immediately you’ve got a £38k hole in your budget I’m afraid.”
All councillors receive an “allowance” of £9,666.21. Members of the executive receive an additional £18,300.18 for a total pay package of £27,966.39. Councillors voted to freeze their allowances as part of this year’s budget, which saw the council make cuts and take £9.1m out of reserves to close a funding gap driven largely by increasing costs in adults and children’s social care.
Mr Smith’s amendment also proposed scrapping the council’s interim mobile library and Visit Somerset contract, and would have reinstated Nailsea Community Transport. It would also have put £8,000 in to “sustain funding streams” for the district’s libraries.
North Somerset’s budget for future years also includes closing some of the district’s libraries to save £433k, although no cuts were included in the 2025/26 budget. Mr Smith’s amendment was roundly voted down, but received nine votes in support from other members of the Conservative group.
The budget for the next financial year, as approved, includes a 4.99% council tax hike — the maximum permitted — and a raft of cuts which one top councillor previously warned would “strip our services to the bone.” The council had faced a £53m budget black hole across the next three years but the planned cuts and savings have now reduced this to £10m.
Justifying the use of reserves, Mr Bell told the meeting: “This has been necessary to balance the budget, particularly in the absence of any sustained funding from the government or exceptional financial support or council tax flexibility.”
He added: “We have literally got to a situation where this is the only way to achieve a balanced budget for 2025/26.”
Ash Cartman (Long Ashton, Independent), who was previously the member of the executive responsible for budget setting until 2023, said he estimated the council had between £20m and £25m worth of “rainy day funds.” He warned: “We are going to spend £9m of that next year. […] If we were a ship, we are sailing very close to the rocks.”
Mr Bell said that the council was “robbed” of £50m a year through lower government funding and a lower council tax base. He told the council meeting on February 18: “This is a ball and chain that is impossible for us.”
Mr Bell warned that adults and children’s social care demand had pushed the budget in the current financial year by about £25m and would continue to be an issue into future years. He said: “Something has got to give and we absolutely look to the government’s spending review and its commitment to a national care service to deliver the urgent reform around care services and care funding that is going to be needed to keep local care services in the shape that we want them to be.”
He added that the council would look at providing more social services in house and at a local level to avoid increasing costs in outsourced and out of area provision. He said: “Frankly it’s taken us far too long to get on top on some of those issues.”
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