Local residents support increase in town precept
There was a total of 1021 responses to the survey the Town Council delivered to 1,980 homes in the parish in September. This included 504 surveys on paper and 517 returned online. This rate of return of 52% is huge compared to the average turn out for a public consultation which is more typically 10-15%.
82% of respondents said they would be prepared to see their local precept raised in order to help protect the town’s leisure centre, library and swimming pool.
Residents were asked to prioritise which service was most important to them. Approximately half of respondents (52%) expressed a preference which showed a fairly even spread across all three services.
Service | Priority |
Library | 36.0 % |
Swimming pool | 32.2% |
Leisure centre | 31.8% |
Of the remaining surveys, 37% of respondents said that ‘All services were equally important to them’, whilst 11% indicated that ‘None were of interest to them’. However, many of the respondents who said none of these services were of interest to them still offered to pay additional money in the precept to save them.
This included older residents who emphasised the need for all these services to be retained for younger residents and children, even though they themselves were now too old to use the leisure centre.
This result gives the Town Council a huge mandate to try to negotiate an agreement with Shropshire Council to save all three services.
The full results of the Town Council survey can be viewed on the Town Council website – see Services-at-Risk-1.pdf
What happens now?
Over the last few months, the mayors of the nine towns in South Shropshire have been meeting with Shropshire Council to negotiate on the subject of ‘venue based’ services such as libraries, leisure centres and swimming pools.
Shropshire Council had calculated that if all Town and Parish Councils increased the local element of their precept by 10% this would raise over £1m which is more than the savings they need to make for leisure and library services as written in their Medium Term Financial Plan.
However, three weeks ago Shropshire abandoned this approach because:
- Some of the larger towns (although none in South Shropshire) refused to participate because they felt secure that their facilities would not be withdrawn even if they didn’t contribute anything, because of their population size.
- Some market Town Councils (but not Church Stretton) are already either operating their libraries, leisure centres and in one case their swimming pool, or contributing financially towards their running costs. This has come about in previous years after their local services were threatened with closure.
Asking towns already contributing financially towards their venue based services to contribute again would lead to an even greater inequity across these towns.
Shropshire Council have now said that they wish to continue negotiations but are looking for individual solutions for each council which takes this into account. The mayors from the nine councils in South Shropshire have agreed to continue to work together, as this gives them a stronger negotiating position which will help in finding a more equitable solution across towns in South Shropshire.
A meeting between the mayors and the Leader of Shropshire Council to discuss these services has been scheduled for the second week of November.
Larger towns not contributing – is this fair?
It seems unfair that residents in the larger towns will get all of their venue based services provided without them having to raise their Town Council precept, whilst residents in the smaller market towns are expected to help finance theirs.
If the larger Town Councils refuse to assist, one option might be for Shropshire Council to look to make savings on venue based services in these towns. For example, the libraries in the bigger towns in Shropshire are currently open 5 or 6 days a week, whilst those in the smaller market towns are mostly open 4 days a week or less. Shropshire Council could perhaps opt to make savings by reducing the opening hours of libraries in the bigger towns.