Council expects to have to find £53m to balance its budget next year with a 9% council tax rise and extensive cuts being considered, reports Nick Clark, Local Democracy Reporter

Newham Council interim chief exec Paul Martin

New austerity measures in Newham will be “resisted” by the council’s population and workforce, the authority’s top boss has admitted.

A 9% council tax increase, childrens’ centre closures, and job and pay cuts, are among measures under consideration at Newham Council.

But the council’s interim chief executive Paul Martin said that after 15 years of austerity, new savings proposals are “always going to be resisted”.

Martin said: “Fifteen years since the austerity regime began following the financial crash and the coalition government in 2010, most councils including Newham have invested so much time and effort in imaginative and creative efforts to reduce spend, it’s very difficult to identify measures that won’t be resisted by a part of the population and indeed our own workforce.

“The point that we’ve reached is one where really many of the things that wouldn’t be contentious have already been done.

“That leads us into areas where probably none of us sitting here would want to be proposing but we have to because of our responsibility to be financially viable.”

He added: “What we’re identifying is always going to be resisted. I don’t believe there will be a saving that we can identify that won’t be resisted by somebody, somewhere, and often for very good reasons.”

Martin was speaking to a committee of councillors as they scrutinised early budget proposals yesterday evening (Thursday 23rd).

The council predicts it will have to find £53m to balance its budget next year.

Proposals include asking permission from the government to raise council tax by 8.99%, closing Stratford Youth Zone, reducing staff numbers, and not agreeing a pay award.

Other possible measures include moving to fortnightly waste collections, cutting care packages, reducing council tax support for poorer residents, and housing homeless families further away.

The council’s cabinet – its committee of leading councillors – agreed yesterday to ask residents for their views on the proposals.

Newham Council’s Labour mayor Rokhsana Fiaz told the cabinet that increased demand for services and the cost of providing them pose “the biggest challenge facing local government in a generation if not more”.

Councils are struggling in particular to cover the costs of providing social care services, and temporary accommodation for vulnerable people at risk of homelessness.

Newham has the highest number of people in temporary accommodation in England – more than 7,500 households – costing the council some £100m a year.

Fiaz said: “We are in a world where demand for our care services and temporary accommodation is rising faster than our income – that is a fact.”

She said that Newham is “not unique in these challenges” but added that the borough is also “at the sharp end of the housing crisis in the capital”.

Fiaz said that the council is on course to spend £140m on temporary accommodation by 2028, and would be in a more “comfortable” position if this wasn’t the case.

She added there had to be a “real debate about what residents expect from their council and from any council and how much of that we can deliver from our current income.”

Fiaz said: “The long term message has to be that we will do it less, but we will do it well.”

The cabinet agreed unanimously to put the proposals to the public. This will include seven consultation events, online and in person, where people can share their views.

The council is set to publish the first draft of its budget in December, which will show which proposals the cabinet has chosen to back.

The final budget will be voted on at a meeting of all councillors in February 2026.

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