From April 2025 to March 2026, we’ll spend more than £1.1 billion on providing services that our residents rely on, including:
- helping 30,000 adults to live well for longer
- ensuring every child is given an opportunity to thrive through high quality care and education
- supporting our residents through a challenging period for household finances
- responding to emergencies and keeping our communities safe
- maintaining our roads, cycleways, and pavements to keep residents moving.
These examples are just a snapshot of some of the 500 services we provide to our 1.2 million residents, as we strive to make Hertfordshire a great place for you to live and work, where everyone feels welcome.
This year’s draft budget has been delivered against a backdrop of rising costs caused by inflation and an increase to employer’s national insurance contributions. Alongside a growing and ageing population putting increased pressure on our services, these factors have made the delivery of a balanced budget incredibly challenging.
We continue to try and address as many of these challenges as possible through increased efficiencies, we expect to make £42 million in savings in the next financial year on top of £46 million in savings agreed in the previous financial year. However, despite our best efforts, we will need to spend £3 million of our reserves and raise Council Tax by the maximum 4.99% (including 2% for adult social care) to deliver a balanced budget.
We will continue to look for solutions internally, working smarter and more efficiently to make every penny count as we support our residents, from their earliest moments right through to the late stages of life.
The proposed budget details how we’ll continue to spend more than £1 billion on services that touch the lives of every resident, business and community while tackling expected shortfalls in funding.
Adult Care Services
- £30 million to ensure adult care providers can continue to support residents, including an uplift to care worker pay.
- £26 million to ensure we can meet the need of the increasing number of older people and adults with disabilities who need our support.
- Launch of new supported living programme.
- A new carers Hub to help support carers access support.
- Further investment in Domestic Abuse One Stop Shop to enhance support for people at medium and standard risk.
Children’s Services
- £28 million investment to support Children Looked After and children with disabilities.
- £1.7 million increasing fostering allowances and extending intensive foster carer project.
- £8 million Capital investment for a third phase of the transformation programme to deliver a further 17 beds of in county residential provision.
- Making permanent the Family Safeguarding (for children in care) approach to helping children in care return home.
Special educational needs and disabilities (SEND)
- Further £2.8 million investment into SEND (rising to £4.6 million in year 2) to help support our improvement journey, on top of the £7 investment into SEND from the last budget.
- £3.6 million to meet costs of transporting SEN pupils to school.
- Capital support for SEND place strategy, including additional grant funding.
- Covering interest costs on High Needs Block deficit.
Highways and Place:
- Investing £100 million in highways maintenance next year, including:
- £4 million additional capital highways maintenance (supported by government grant)
- £3 million additional capital preventative maintenance (following acceleration of delivery of existing 2 year programme).
- Flooding – investment to improve flood protection and investigations, and to ensure planning applications reduce flood risks for the future.
- £3 million to manage the increase in the cost and demand of waste services.
Public Health – 3 year Prevention and Health Inequalities Fund
- £3.4 million will be for transformational large-scale projects that support residents to stay well and healthy, reduce demand for public services, and address health inequalities in Hertfordshire.
The analysis of revenue and capital proposals across service areas – Revenue and Capital Proposal 2025-26 (PDF, 87KB). This table looks at:
- Net Revenue Budget (the amount of money for providing day to day services, such as social care and disposing of waste)
- Capital proposals (investments in buildings, infrastructure and equipment).
This schedule contains a complete list of all investments, pressures and savings planned in the revenue budget for the next 4 years. It includes new items proposed in this budget round, as well as some items agreed in previous budget rounds that take effect next year.