Your guide to Council Tax

Contents

  1. How we spend our budget
  2. About your Council Tax

How we spend our budget - A message from Cllr Tracey Dixon, Leader of the Council

2025 / 26 budget

As your council, we provide a wide range of services to the 150,000 people in South Tyneside. We are here to support you and base our financial decision making on sure we provide extra help for those who need it most. We also provide the services that you rely on like bin collections, maintaining the roads, supporting local bus services, leisure services, children's and adult social care and much more.

Adult and children's social care where we must continue to provide a range of services under the law continue to be our biggest areas of spend and take up over 70% of our discretionary budget.

Council Tax might be collected by South Tyneside Council, but it is made up of lots of parts like also paying for the Police and Fire Service which are independent of the Council. It could also be called a Borough Tax as it provides vital services from organisations which are there to support all people across South Tyneside.

This year council tax will rise by 4.95%.

Of the 4.95% increase, your core council tax will rise by 2.95%. This increase mainly pays for social care services that support vulnerable adults and children, including those in foster care. It also contributes to maintaining the roads you drive on, the paths you walk, the street lamps that light our way, and the parks, beaches, leisure facilities, and open spaces you enjoy.

From the moment you step outside your home, council services and their dedicated staff are working hard to help you live a healthy, happy, and fulfilled life.

The Government's Adult Social Care levy, which is the part of council tax that can only be spent on adult social care services, will increase by 2%.

Tyne and Wear Fire and Civil Defence Authority and the Northumbria Police and Crime Commissioner are responsible for setting the police and fire precepts. This is the amount of money you pay through your council tax for police and fire.

We still expect to have one of the lowest council tax levels across the North East.

We continue to look at how to target our support to make things fairer, helping those who need it the most. This year we will help around 11,000 working age people who need support with their council tax bills through our Council Tax Reduction Scheme. Last year we created a simple and fairer council tax support system that is easier to understand and apply. You can find out if you are eligible for this support on page 10.

We also support South Tyneside Council care leavers, who do not have to pay council tax up to the age of 25. The Government's national Council Tax support scheme will help 7,000 pensioners in South Tyneside with their council tax payments.

The money we spend on services available to you comes from council tax, business rates and paid services as well as the government grant, we receive each year. The government grant has almost halved taking account of inflation since 2010. The reduction in this grant has put huge pressures on our finances and means we rely upon other sources of revenue such as council tax.

We also look for external funding to help pay for the capital investment programme. We have been successful in attracting millions of pounds of external funding for the borough including £20m for South Shields and a further £20m for Jarrow from the Long-Term Plan for Towns fund. We have also been named a Community Regeneration Partnership Area. We will continue to do everything we can to attract external funding to South Tyneside. We continue to press for a fairer government grant. The Government has given an early indication for a more positive distribution of resources to areas such as South Tyneside in the future.

We've worked to make sure that services are accessible whilst recovering some of the rising costs to deliver these services. We've kept subsidies in as many areas as possible for those that need our support the most.

We've kept costs as low as we can and will continue to subsidise as many services as we are able to. The council cannot run a deficit like other organisations. If we do not increase the amount of money coming into the Council, we would have to stop providing the services which our communities rely upon.

The way we choose to spend the Council's budget is guided by our residents and businesses and by the priorities you shaped in the Borough's 20-year vision. The Ambition of targeting support to make things fairer underpins how we make our financial decision

Councillor Tracey Dixon
Leader of the Council

View Your guide to Council Tax 2025 to 2026.

About your Council Tax