Despite not taking part in dry January after the 4th I have managed to put in a serious block of training for this years’ time trial season which opens in April and runs through to the end of August. I’m currently putting in over 100 miles a week in short 30 min bursts of 45km/h minimum. I have absolutely no idea whether this is helpful to my performance later in the year but it makes me feel quite good.
As you will have noticed there has been a lot of chatter about the budget settlement for local government over the last 6 weeks or so. It started immediately before Christmas when we were told that we would have an additional £4m removed from our funding. This is very late notice for such a large change but we worked through the holiday period to identify options of how we could deliver that challenge. This week on the same day Cabinet recommended their budget to Council we learned that we would be getting a transitional grant of £3m for 2 years to smooth the process of having all of our revenue support grant (RSG) removed before 2019-20. So you win some and then you lose some, but the impact is a reduction again. Council will set the budget at its meeting on February 23 and will consider a council tax rise of 2% and an additional social care levy of a further 2% (a 4% rise in total).
It will be good to get this protracted process behind us so that we can get on with delivery of important services to our citizens, clients, customers and consumers across Wiltshire.
Speak again soon. For daily updates, discussion, personal opinion, comment or just to connect or keep in touch you can follow me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/#!/drcarltonbrand.
Carlton
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