PAUL MCLAUGHLIN

Hastings Borough Council’s Cabinet has approved draft budget plans, including a 2.99% council tax increase for residents from April. This is the maximum rise allowed by the government without triggering a local referendum. The increase will bring the total annual bill for an average Band D property in Hastings to over £2,600.

Chief Finance Officer Kit Wheeler presented the Revenue Budget 2026/27, and Capital Programme 2026/27 to 2028/29 to senior councillors last Monday (2 February). He reported that the council’s financial position had “improved significantly” when compared to recent years. He praised the efforts of staff and councillors who had worked hard and made real sacrifices to cut costs and put staff vacancies on hold to make savings. 

He acknowledged that austerity measures, imposed on the council three years ago by the previous government to avoid a Section 114 notice to prevent bankruptcy, had affected the delivery of local services. However, he insisted this was a “necessary part of our process to achieve our goal of financial sustainability.” The council’s reserves are expected to increase from just £4m – the minimum level considered necessary to withstand significant financial shocks – to “hover currently at about the £7m mark.” 

The council’s budgetary pressures stem primarily from spiralling costs in the housing budget. Cabinet members were warned just last month of a predicted overspend of around £700,000 in the next financial year due to providing temporary accommodation (TA). This month, however, Chris Hancock, the Head of Housing, told Cabinet that more recent figures indicated a much-improved position, with 28 households moving out of private temporary accommodation into their own homes because of the council’s property acquisition policy. He added that he hoped to see sustained progress over the coming year, with a target of up to eight households a month leaving private temporary accommodation and moving into a permanent home.

Mr Hancock also highlighted the council’s work on homelessness prevention. He told the Cabinet that they were on track to spend around £193,000 less than it had budgeted for by the end of the current financial year.

Cllr Darren Mackenzie, the Finance, Risk and ICT Portfolio Holder, welcomed the improved budgetary position and thanked officers for their “incredible efforts”. Cllr Glenn Haffenden, the Council Leader, echoed the sentiments before adding that the budget proposals would “likely” see further changes before being signed off at a meeting of Full Council on 11 February.

East Sussex County Council will meet to set its 2026/27 budget on 10 February, where councillors are expected to confirm a council tax rise of 4.99%. This is made up of 2.99% on council tax and 2% on the Adult Social Care Precept.

Of your council tax income, over 73% goes to East Sussex County Council, around 13% to Hastings Borough Council, and 11% to the Sussex Police and Crime Commissioner.

HUGH SULLIVAN

The cabinet of Hastings Borough Council (HBC) met on 6 November to debate a very mixed financial agenda. They were reviewing a latest update of the various projects within the £24.3 million Town Deal programme currently going forward, and went on to contemplate the prospect of receiving £40m of further levelling up awards to be bestowed upon Hastings from central government coffers over the next ten years. 

But they were also on the receiving end of two sobering reports from the council’s Chief Finance Officer, Kit Wheeler. A Medium Term Financial Strategy report which he presented to them shows a forecast £13.8m cumulative shortfall between council income and expenditure between now and March 2027, including £4.3m in the current financial year, described as “completely unsustainable for the future going concern of the council”. A declaration of insolvency would be unavoidable without substantial spending cuts and/or sales of capital assets to bridge the deficit.

Leader Paul Barnett began the meeting by reversing the order of agenda items, he said, to accommodate the majority in the public arena who had come to hear debate on the Town Deal programme. So the positive news came first. It was announced last month that Hastings would receive a further £20m to be spent on capital projects as a partner in the Levelling Up Partnership scheme promoted by DLUHC (Department of Levelling Up, Housing and Communities), plus another £20m spread over ten years as one of 55 towns to benefit from Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s Long Term Plan for Towns. Deputy leader Cllr Maya Evans, who is the council’s portfolio holder for Regeneration, told her colleagues that the £10m allocated for the garden town project from Town Deal funds is just “phase one”.

She spoke of the garden town regeneration covering an area of the town centre “two or three times bigger than what we plan at the moment,, and described it as “now a £100 million project”. To get to this figure she said that ”we’ll do our best to claw funding wherever available”. She made strong suggestions that Southern Water should be first in line to contribute.

“Housing, health and culture are the lynchpins which will inform our levelling up projects,” Cllr Evans concluded. “Hastings is transforming, and everyone needs to benefit… It’s a turning point in history, a really big step for the town.”

Fellow cabinet members piled in with enthusiastic support. Cllr Barnett described the current town centre as “awful” but assured his listeners that it “will look completely different in a couple of years time”. Cllr Andy Batsford said that this kind of transformation “is what we get involved in local politics for”. Cllr Judy Rogers seconded Cllr Evans’ motion “to continue to progress the implementation” of all Town Deal projects. It was universally approved.

BUDGET DEFICITS

Then came the presentation of the two reports outlining the council’s financial predicament. An immediate monitoring survey showed that HBC is now heading for a total overspend of £3.4m on its current year budget (which already anticipated a £0.9m deficit) as a result of the rise in homelessness coupled with salary increases across all departments in line with a nationwide local authority pay settlement. Recently appointed Head of Housing Chris Hancock told the cabinet that the trend of people needing temporary accommodation had “stabilised” but that development sites for new housing had been delayed – viz. at Harrow Lane – so that “we won’t make our target”. 

Mr Wheeler went on to present the red-ink figures for the following three years amounting to the cumulative total of £13.8m. “It’s a very big deficit we need to address.”

Cllr Barnett commented that councils all over the country had “lived in hope” for more than ten years – “those hopes have been dashed.”Hastings, he said, had “become a popular location as a creative, exciting and ‘dressing-up’ town”, but that success had itself produced a housing crisis, exacerbated by the government’s failure to stop evictions under Section 21 of the Housing Act. “I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s time to be really pessimistic… We’re not going to be bailed out. We have to take responsibility.”

A motion was passed under which the council is to halt any capital expenditure that isn’t a statutory responsibility or will lead to demonstrable revenue savings. It will look to identify further capital assets to be sold off. Savings in service costs will need to found so as to balance the budget, with a focus on reducing expenditure on temporary housing. 

Full Council should “note the actions to address the budget deficit and, if no conclusive savings [are] identified, that the issue of a Section 114 notice [a formal declaration of insolvency] will take place in 2024/25”.

So bloom or bust? Or both?