Welcome to the Isle of Wight Council Budget Simulator

The on line budget simulator allows you to find out about different areas of the Council's work and tell us how you think we should allocate our budget next year. You can identify your own spending priorities and see the effects those decisions would have on services and on council tax rises.

The Council's budget this year is £336m. After deducting specific grants and income of £130m and taking into account the dedicated schools grant of £74m, the Council's total net budget is £132m. This is funded from central government grants, including redistributed business rate income, and council tax. Because of the impact of the credit crunch and economic downturn on the national economy, the Council is likely to have less money from central government in future years.

The Council has a policy of not increasing council tax by more than is absolutely necessary. At this stage a figure of 2.5% is being aimed for. To do this next year we will need to find substantial savings. We are already trying to reduce our spend in support service areas by doing things differently, making better use of our land and buildings, having better computer systems and employing less staff. This will not be enough to make all the savings we need to. We will need to make other savings by reducing spend in some areas and increasing the income from fees and charges in others.

Clearly any changes we make to service budgets or income charges has an impact on island residents and visitors. So we hope that you will take just a few minutes to use this simulator and tell us how you think we should make these savings.

Some of the services we provide are statutory, and cannot be reduced. This simulator includes some of those services which can be influenced locally, the budget for which is £81m. Your target is to find savings, either through reducing spend or increasing charges, of at least £5m.

Your views will help us to draw up a budget for 2010/11. Results from this survey will be published on www.iwight.com and reported along with the results from other consultation exercises to Cabinet in January 2010 before the budget is set in February 2010.