Statement from Mayor Brenda Dacres
You may have seen in the news, reports of councils across the country effectively going bankrupt. This is the result of years of chronic underfunding of public services, with councils being amongst the hardest impacted. Budgets have also been affected by ever-increasing demand for services, as more and more people turn to their local council for support, particularly children’s services and adult social care.
In Lewisham we are doing everything we can to balance the books. Councils have a legal duty to set a balanced budget, and if they can’t a team of Government-appointed commissioners effectively take over local decision-making. This means decisions don’t necessarily reflect local priorities.
We set our budget for 2025/26 in March. Since then, council officers have been looking for further savings that can be agreed now, to help us recoup some of the reserves we are planning on using this year (essentially topping up our emergency savings account) and to help us make a head start on savings for next year.
As you’d expect, decisions are getting harder and harder, and we’re carefully considering the impact of each proposal, which is why they’re being considered in detail by our scrutiny committees (a group of elected councillors, who feed back their views to me and my cabinet) before a decision is made at our Mayor and Cabinet meeting in July.
In total, they aim to save a further £30m in total by the end of the next financial year.In some cases, where proposals directly impact services, further consultation with service users will be carried out, and I’m committed to keep you updated about our ongoing financial position.
The difficult decisions mean we can keep providing support for our most vulnerable residents, as well as the services that we all use and value, from bin collections and street cleaning, to maintaining our parks and running youth services and libraries.
In the meantime, I will continue to join councils across London, making sure Lewisham’s voice is heard as we work with the Government so that local councils like Lewisham can have access to fair and sufficient funding and together repair the damage done by 14 years of austerity.