Fire authority to increase council tax in Peterborough by nearly £5 per year

Households in Cambridgeshire and Peterborough will be paying around £5 more towards the fire service this year.

The Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Fire Authority has agreed to increase its share of council tax by £4.95 for a Band D property for the next financial year.

A report presented to the fire authority meeting earlier today (Friday, February 10), said council tax precepts made up nearly two thirds of the fire service’s funding.

Full band breakdown of the council tax bands:

Band A £53.28, Band B £62.16, Band C £71.04, Band D £79.92, Band E £97.68, Band F £115.44, Band G £133.20, Band H £159.84.

The meeting heard that the fire authority had budgeted for a five per cent pay increase for firefighters, however, earlier this week it was announced that a new national offer of seven per cent had been made to the Fire Brigades Union.

The union is due to ballot its members on the new offer and has not yet been agreed.

Matthew Warren, the deputy chief executive at the fire authority, said the service would be able to pay this increase using ‘rainy day funds’.

He said: “[The pay offer] is in excess of what is included in this budget from a pay perspective, what it does do is take away any of the rainy day money.

“There is money set aside in our supplies and services, but all of a sudden anything that we were going to use to enhance and improve the service is really going to be taken up on paying the pay award.

“That in the short term is not an issue because clearly we would hopefully look to catch up again in future years, but it does represent a problem if we do need to invest in the service because we will need to go back to the financial business continuity plan.

“That is something we are doing anyway, I just wanted to highlight that because it does change the context slightly in terms of the good news story we were projecting.”

Chris Strickland, the Chief Fire Officer, highlighted that the service was serving a “significantly growing” population in Cambridgeshire and Peterborough, and that the “contingency fund” had been planned to be used to invest to support that growth.

He said: “We are serving an increasingly large population but we are having to use any excess cash that we get to effectively maintain services.

“There is no doubt moving forward if we want to do things to improve the service we will have to think about where we take resources so that we can put them in other places, which is not an ideal place to be.”

“We will certainly open up some conversations with the Home Office and the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities over the early part of this year about our settlement for next year, and whether there is a possibility to look at the precept ceiling for next year.”