Budget consultation 2025
  • Worcester City Council budget consultation

    Helping us set the 2026-27 budget
  • Worcester City Council is the only organisation exclusively dedicated to serving Worcester’s 106,700 residents, but we face tough decisions as we consider how your money should be spent and what our priorities should be for the year ahead.

    Every year the Council is required by law to set a balanced budget, setting out where we will invest and where we’ll make savings.

    For the current financial year we implemented a Financial Sustainability Plan to deliver £970,000 in savings, and in 2026-27 we are aiming to achieve further savings.

    However, the size of the challenge we face cannot be fixed through savings alone, so our budget proposals include plans to change the way our council works and delivers services.

    Our budget and Council Tax levels for 2026-27 will be set at a meeting of the Full Council in February 2026.

    Before we make any decisions, we want to hear what you think about how we deliver our services.

    If you are 18 or over and resident in Worcester, or if you run a business or are part of a local group in the city, please take part in this consultation before Sunday 18 January 2026.

    To find out how we use your data and responses, please see our Privacy Notice.

     

  • Where the City Council gets its money from

    Worcester City Council gets its income from several sources set out in the graph below.

    Worcester City Council receives 10% of the total Council Tax collected from households in the city.

  • How the council spends its money

    The table below shows the 2025-2026 gross expenditure, less fees and charges.

    For every pound we spend, this is how it is split between different services.

    1 Arts and culture £0.10
    2 Community safety and engagement £0.08
    3 Council Tax billing, housing benefits and other payments £0.11
    4 Customer Service £0.02
    5 Environmental Health and Licensing £0.05
    6 Housing and homelessness £0.14
    7 Planning and planning enforcement £0.08
    8 Rubbish collection and recycling £0.17
    9 Sports & leisure centres and facilities, parks, play areas £0.05
    10 Street cleansing £0.17
    11 Support for local businesses £0.01

    The services that Worcester City Council delivers are generally getting more expensive to run. 

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  • The Council is having to make some difficult decisions on the level of services it is able to provide. The less funding the council agrees to give to a service, the less that service will provide. 

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  • The City Council invests in a range of areas of work in Worcester.

    • Communities can include support for housing and homelessness, community safety, sports and leisure, housing benefits.
    • Environment can include recycling and waste collection, street cleaning. sustainability and biodiversity, green spaces, environmental health.
    • Economy can include support for businesses, city events, business rates.
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  • About you

    This section of the survey is about you. Each of the questions below is optional and you can skip any or all of them.

    It is very helpful if you do answer these questions so that we can:

    • Make sure our services are open to everyone in the city
    • Treat everyone fairly and appropriately when they use our services
    • In consultations, make sure that we have views from all across the city

    The Equality Act 2010 makes these aims part of our legal duties. Your answers help us check that we have met the law and help improve our services.

    Your answers are completely confidential and will not be used in a way that identifies you. We will only use this information to make our services better.

    For more information on how we use this information, see our Privacy Notice.

  • Ethnicity

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