Council budget

Newcastle City Council touches the lives of everybody in our city, every day.

Most people know that we empty bins, run car parks or provide recycling centres, but we do much, much more. In fact, as the only council for the area we cover, we provide more than 800 services to our communities.

That includes:

• adult social care
• building regulations and planning
• children’s services, including support for families and children in care
• community safety
• concessionary travel
• consumer protection and trading standards
• economic development
• elections and electoral registration
• education, skills and training
• environmental health
• housing
• libraries
• licensing
• markets
• museums and galleries
• parking
• public health
• registration of births, deaths and marriages
• roads and highways
• rubbish and recycling collection and disposal, and street cleaning

Most of the services we provide are things that by law we must do – what are called statutory services. In some cases how we provide them is tightly controlled by the Government. In others we can choose how best to deliver them, to meet the needs of local people.

There are also other services that we can choose to offer - things like pest control or large economic regeneration projects. These are known as discretionary services.

Each year, to pay for the running of these hundreds of services, we must set a budget. This plans where the money will come from and how we will spend it.