Glossary of terms

A precept is a charge that is an amount that is added to a council tax bill. The adult social care precept is used to help pay for the cost of delivering adult social care services.

Adult social care services include services which help people with physical or mental disabilities and mental health needs to carry out their daily routines.

The amount of money available to spend on services.

This is the gap between the amount of money coming in (through council tax and grant funding) and the amount of money going out (through providing services).

The bigger the gap, the bigger the problem.

Inflation is the term we use to describe rising prices. How quickly prices go up is called the rate of inflation. 

This means that the same amount of money will buy less than it could before.

Here's an example. If something costs £10 and it goes up by 2%, then it would cost £10.20p. That’s an increase of 20p.

If the amount you start with is bigger then the size of the increase will be more, even though the percentage change is the same.

So if something with a price tag of £1000 goes up 2%, it would cost £20 more.

Key services are the ones that keep people safe and keep the town running. They include things like social care services for adults and children, refuse collections and managing the payment of benefits.

The referendum limit is the maximum amount that councils can raise council tax before having to hold a referendum (a local vote) on the increase.

In the Autumn Statement the Chancellor increased the referendum limit from 3% to 5%.

A regeneration project is one which involves redeveloping or revitalising a piece of land or building with one or more of the following aims:

• Providing new or improved facilities for residents and / or businesses
• Attracting new investment to the town
• Creating new jobs

Regeneration projects are not funded from Council Tax. They are funded by specific grants (see 'ring fenced grants') which can only be used for that project.

This is the amount of money the Council has from xxx. It is a bit like the savings you might have in the bank. Reserves are there to provide a 'safety net' in an emergency.

In the same way that you can only spend your savings once, if the Council were to use its reserves to fill the funding gap we could only do this once so we would face the same problem again next year. It would also mean that we would have no 'safety net' for emergencies.

A grant of money that can only be used for a specific purpose. For example, the Town Deal grant is ring fenced to the five specified Town Deal projects and cannot be used for anything else.

The opposite is non-ring fenced grants which can be used for any project or service.

This means reorganising how staff work in order to make savings. This could include things like:

• Freezing vacant posts - leaving vacant posts vacant
• Combining posts - giving the duties of a vacant post to one or more current members of staff (on top of their current duties) instead of recruiting a new member of staff
• Encouraging existing members of staff who are close to retirement age to retire. Their posts can then be frozen or combined with another post instead of replacing them
• Redundancies

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