So many questions hanging over budget

THE starting whistle has been blown to kick off budget season, and the warnings that have come with it, are deafeningly serious.

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A lot of questions about the budget currently being directed to experts start “what happens if” at the moment, because this is the most important budget in many years, not because of where money will be spent, or what it will be spent on but the very bottom line - how much will there be to spend?

If no budget is passed by the start of the financial year, then the amount available drops to 75% and words like “catastrophic” were being used to describe the possible impact of that today.

For councils to plug the gap, council tax could be hiked 20% to plug the difference, and there could be large job losses in the region of 23,000.