Do you think Aberdeenshire Council spends too large a proportion of its budget on Education or Corporate Services? Perhaps you would like to see more spent on Housing & Social Work? What consequences would changes to these spending priorities have for your community?
We would like you to support our budget setting for 2014 and beyond and tell us what you think our priorities should be.
Local authorities across Scotland and the UK face difficult choices about how to balance budgets with reductions in public spending from the Scottish and UK Government. We have decisions to make for the future and want to understand what people of all ages who live, work, or visit Aberdeenshire want us to spend money on.
This interactive budget simulator gives you the chance to tell us how you’d like us to prioritise spending across four themes. You can increase, decrease or make no changes to each service. But can you get the budget to balance?
The consultation only covers day-to-day running costs like the money we spend on staffing, leisure and libraries, social care, roads and winter gritting or waste. It does not cover capital budgets such as new buildings or transport infrastructure. It also does not include council tax as this has been frozen in Scotland over recent years.
This is one tool that will be used alongside our face to face engagement events taking place across Aberdeenshire over October and November. The feedback we receive will be pulled into a report and posted on our website. It will also be used to inform next year’s budget which councillors will consider in February 2014.
You can access the budget simulator here: