Share your thoughts as we plan for the future

Cambridgeshire County Council is committed to:

"Creating a greener, fairer and more caring Cambridgeshire"

We will work closer to our communities, partners and residents to deliver this vision, through our seven ambitions which are set out in our Strategic Framework. This can be viewed in more detail from the Documents section of this page.

We have worked to make Cambridgeshire greener by:

• Undertaking an education buildings retrofit program, saving 69 schools an estimated £5.8 million so far, with an estimated £26 million to be saved from school budgets over the lifetime of the works (you can find out more through this link: Cambridgeshire County Council on track to reach its Net Zero 2030 goals | Cambridgeshire County Council).
• Improving our Footway Maintenance Program.

We have worked to make Cambridgeshire fairer by:

• Opening the newly renovated Technology Enabled Care (TEC) Smart Flat in September 2024, a dedicated space to showcase technology that helps people stay at home and independent for longer (you can find out more through this link: Launch of new ‘Technology Enabled Care’ flat showcases ways technology can enable independence at home | Cambridgeshire County Council).
• Investing in our libraries to offer a wider range of services, providing business advice, digital connectivity, training opportunities and spaces where skills can be developed to help people gain employment.

We have worked to make Cambridgeshire more caring by:

• Launching a new social work academy and boosted training and career opportunities for local care workers (you can find out more through this link: Social Care Academy Launched in Cambridgeshire | Cambridgeshire County Council).
• Supporting places like the Hot Pots Café through the Learning Disability Partnership that helps people with learning disabilities and autism develop independence and employment skills:
  

What are we engaging on?

Delivering our vision of a greener, fairer and more caring Cambridgeshire comes with a responsibility to set a balanced budget for our services. We do this through our business planning process every year, where we decide how we will spend and save the money that makes up our budget. There are difficult decisions to make to balance the budget. The county’s population is growing, and both the costs and demand for key council services are rising. (For more information on how Cambridgeshire is changing, see this link to Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Insight). A third of our funding comes from Council Tax, but nearly half of our spending is on adults' and children's social care. Visit our Budget overview page (External link) to find out where our budget came from and how it was spent in the 2024-25 financial year. 

Where the council's funding comes from for 2024-25 The council's spending for 2024-25

As we develop our plan for our future spending and savings, we want to hear your views on:

• reductions in spending across our service areas,
• how we could increase our income or make further savings,
• Council Tax.

We are engaging with you in two phases between November 2024 and January 2025 so your views can help inform decision-making about our next Business Plan, which sets out our budget decisions for the next five financial years.

This Engagement Survey is Phase 1, where we ask for your general views on how we should prioritise our spending and savings decisions.

How to take part

The survey can be accessed below or through this link: Business Plan and Budget 2025-26 Engagement Survey. We encourage you to read the Supporting Document before completing our survey to share your views. This Supporting Document gives more information about the challenges of setting the budget and can be accessed through this link: Supporting Document.

Please complete this engagement survey by Monday 2nd December 2024, when this survey closes.