Budget consultation 2024/25

This consultation has closed.

We consulted on plans to deliver a balanced budget in the 2024/25 financial year.

Our consultation ran from Monday 4 December 2023 until midnight on Sunday 7 January 2024. It will inform the decisions our councillors make at the Full Council meeting on 21 February 2024 on the overall budget.

Read our Budget Consultation booklet:

The budget document sets out a number of areas we will focus on in the coming financial year. This includes:

• A continued focus on growth and regeneration, bringing forward development plans for a number of sites across the city, including the Station Quarter, the former TK Maxx building on Bridge Street, the Wellington Street and Dickens Street car parks, and the area known as Middleholme adjacent to the river close to the city centre.
• Increased efforts to attract new employers into Peterborough, including those who can offer better paid and permanent employment opportunities.
• Supporting people who are struggling the most, including through expanding our network of community hubs.
• Increasing our efforts to work with residents who are in housing difficulty at the earliest possible opportunity, to prevent them becoming homeless in the first place.
• A continued focus on the city centre, making sure it is a place which is vibrant and where people feel and are safe. We will increase our workforce in the city centre to make sure that the issues that matter to people, such as anti-social behaviour, street drinking, littering, and graffiti are tackled.
• Refocussing our adult skills service, delivered by City College Peterborough, so that it helps people with few or no formal qualifications or work experience to gain employment.
• Continuing to develop our new Local Plan, which will set out our strategy and policies to deliver growth, alongside our new Housing Strategy.
• Supporting the city to become net zero, which will help to reduce fuel poverty, improve physical and mental health, improve air quality, stimulate our economy, and provide jobs for the local area.
• Supporting even more people to remain independent for as long as possible, through technology enabled care and reablement services.
• Developing a Shared Lives scheme to support adults with learning disabilities, mental health problems or other needs which make it harder for them to live on their own.
• Investing even more money into Children’s Services to be able to meet the rising demand and improve the services that we offer children and families.
• Developing a social work academy to support the recruitment and retention of social workers.
• Supporting families through the Family Hubs model which has attracted significant Government funding.
• Developing three new hubs to meet the needs of children with Autism and Social, Emotional, Mental Health (SEMH) needs.
• Improving and protecting the health of everyone who lives in Peterborough.

Next steps

Our Joint Scrutiny Committee will consider the feedback and suggestions we receive from the consultation at a meeting on 22 January 2024. We may make changes to the proposed budget as a result. We will then report this to our Cabinet on 12 February 2024, before formally proposing a final budget for 2024/25 to Full Council on 21 February 2024.