Planning for the future 2025/26
The council continues to focus on the increasingly difficult challenge of producing a balanced budget year on year. While over £150m of savings has already been taken out of the council’s budget since 2009/10 to meet persistent gaps in funding and address rising costs to services, further significant savings are still needed to address the scale of the challenges being faced.
There was a projected budget gap of £16.6m per annum by 2025/26, when the 2024/25 council tax was agreed last year in February 2024. The rising cost of adult and children’s social care as well as housing services then added over £24m in costs for 2025/26 in addition to the projected budget gap.
Despite this challenge, a balanced budget has been achieved for 2025/26 through necessary savings and the use of council reserves, built up over years careful financial management. However, the current projected budget gap is now around £26.6m in 2026/27, which means significant savings in addition to those in the current budget must be found in the coming years to meet this gap.
While the palatable options for the budget continue to narrow, residents are asked for their views on what is important for council services over the next few years.
Engagement with residents continues to be important, with many residents directly helping to make the borough a place to be proud of and one where it’s a pleasure to live, work, do business and spend leisure time.
The ongoing financial challenges have not stopped Bromley being an effective and award-winning council, with many achievements taking place and some of the achievements from the last year.
Key council achievements
- Completed the cost-saving move of Bromley’s Civic Centre to Churchill Court, with residents now being served from the new site and the reception open for those who need to visit.
- Came first place for the second year running across all London Boroughs for household recycling, with almost half of household waste being recycled and virtually no waste sent to landfill.
- Brokered a state-of-the-art Health and Wellbeing Centre at part of Bromley’s new civic centre site, which will open to residents in 2025, providing a range of healthcare services in the heart of the town centre, including a GP surgery.
- Planting over 1200 trees this winter to complete the four-year Treemendous programme, which will see 5000 trees planted in total.
- Received an ‘Outstanding’ rating for our Youth Justice Service, being one of only five across London to receive this highest grading following inspection, which follows the achievement last year of an Outstanding Ofsted rating across the board in Children’s Services.
- Continued to deliver the £1m Platinum Jubilee Parks Fund, with various park improvements delivered across the borough with the support of local groups.
- Won the Gold Award for our Loneliness Strategy at the iESE Public Sector Transformation Award, showing the success of our partnership approach to identifying and combatting loneliness across the borough.
- Progressing the multi-million-pound refurbishment of the Walnuts and West Wickham leisure centre, with both centres now closed as works get underway on the much-anticipated upgrade.
- Received bronze award accreditation for our ongoing commitment to the local armed forces community, being one of just twelve London authorities to achieve this, with work underway to achieving silver and then gold accreditation.
- Completed the conversion of 28,000 Bromley’s streetlamps to LEDs, saving £1m per year, with LED installation on council buildings also reducing electricity consumption by 40 per cent.
- Delivering essential repair and refurbishment works at libraries across the borough, with an improved and extended West Wickham Library set to reopen following refurbishment in the coming months.
- Received a ‘Good’ or ‘Outstanding’ rating for 97 per cent of Bromley Schools and 97.9 per cent of early years settings that have been inspected, above the national average.
- Nine parks and green spaces in Bromley have been awarded the Green Flag Award for parks and greenspaces.
- Delivering more Bromley Homes for Bromley People at sites across the borough, including affordable housing developments progressing in West Wickham, Beckenham and at Bromley North, while also completing housing acquisition schemes to secure the properties needed to provide permanent homes for our residents facing homelessness.
- Received a ‘Good’ grading for Adult Education Services, with the inspection acknowledging many aspects of our offer were very strong and impactful.
- Installed 15 new Electric Vehicle (EV) charging bays in our multi-storey car park in Bromley town centre.
- Won the Silver iESE Transformation award for our Bromley Homelessness Health Project, which was also shortlisted for the HSJ Patient Safety Awards.
- Received Government commendation for work across Adult Social Care, with Bromley noted as well ahead on ‘digital’ and ‘co-production’ transformation.
- The Local Land Charges Team was recognised for a consecutive year in the Local Land Charges Excellence Awards.
- Were finalists for two awards with the Contact Centre Association for Customer Services
- Achieved Crystal Mark accreditation for the council website, by the plain English campaign, which also achieved an AA rating for Website Content Accessibility Guidelines
- Our Safeguarding Manager won a Partnership Champion Award at the National Safeguarding Adult Boards Excellence Awards.
- Developed the new Safer Bromley Strategy for 2024 to 2027 to keep our borough even safer and achieved the highest compliance rate in the MET Police area in dealing with crime related to ‘hotspots’.
How much is the council's net budget?
The council has projected a net budget of £284 million for 2025/26.
Our spending includes
A large part of the council's services are funded by specific government grants which includes, for example, funding for schools and housing benefits. The council has very limited influence on how this money is spent.
The council has a statutory duty to have a balanced budget and action will be required to eliminate the budget gap which involves difficult choices.
The 2025/26 local government settlement is the seventh one-year settlement in a row and this continues to hamper strategic financial planning, making it especially challenging to set a medium-term financial strategy.
- £99 million on adult social care providing services from care assessment to home care, from support for those with physical disabilities, to support for those with learning disabilities and those with mental health issues.
- £92 million is for children and young people and includes safeguarding and social care, special educational needs services, behavioural support, early years, education and schools.
- £23 million on providing housing services.
- £40 million is spent on the environment such as waste services, street cleaning, traffic, public protection, road safety and maintaining Bromley’s parks and green spaces.
- £8 million for renewal and recreation covering services like our libraries, regenerating and managing our town centres, and our planning services.
- £11m million is spent on concessionary fares (Freedom Passes).
How does the way the council is funded affect its budget?
- Bromley has the second lowest level of grant funding from central government per head of population in London giving us £148 per head of population in 2025/6 compared to the average in London of £382 and the highest is £638.
- The council has expressed and continues to express serious concerns with the current and previous governments about the fairness of the funding system and to lobby for a fairer deal for our residents.
- If the council received the average level of grant funding for London, income would increase by £80.4 million.
- Bromley has the fourth lowest council tax in outer London.