Ambitious Plans for the Future

The new town council in Kingswood is excited that it can finally focus on delivering some new services and activities for the community in Kingswood. It wants Kingswood to be a great place to grow up and grow old and believes that investing in younger people and families will create opportunities for everyone.

The town council has set its budget for the new financial year after deliberation in meeting and meeting the residents, who gave a steer on what our priorities should be over the coming years.  The priorities were obvious:  investing in young people, delivering events for the community to enjoy and participate in, and giving financial awards to local community groups who are doing amazing things but with limited funds.   It goes without saying that there are the usual overheads to pay for our administration, and staff, and we hope to increase our staff base from the current town clerk to employing a community events officer. We have kept the admin and staff costs low, at approximately 28% of our overall budget, leaving the remainder to be put to good use in the community.

Our new annual budget of £826,480 (collected via your council tax) seems a lot of money, but when broken down across the 8,500 households in Kingswood, starts to offer real value for money. It is a considerable increase from the previous year, but the budget last year was not influenced by the town council and was a startup budget, to cover the initial costs of setting up the IT and internal governance, employing a clerk and sufficient to provide for overheads like insurance, audit costs, and training.

Residents in an average Band D property will be paying just under £99 a year, or under £2 a week to the town council, but in return we can confirm that 90 pence a week (43% of our total budget) will go straight into projects to support young people and their families.  That might be additional family support, youth activities and provision, or creating more opportunities to learn some new skills, or just hanging out with friends, in supervised youth sessions.  We want to work with the amazing groups and partners that already support people, and so will be looking for opportunities to bolster what is already on offer.

We want to ensure that the much-loved library can continue to offer the wide range of services that are greatly appreciated by you.  We will work in partnership with library services to ensure that your 7 pence a week is put to good use.

Kingswood is bursting with organizations that offer something for everyone, be that the provision of activities, event or services, but we understand how hard it is to have sustainable funding streams.  We are setting up a £50,000 community grant scheme from May, which will be for the community groups to apply to, for much needed and welcome funds to support them in bringing benefit to the residents.  That will cost you 12 pence a week.

In the short term we are operating without a base and meeting locally in the Park Centre, but it is our ambition to become custodians of a central hub, a space that is not just home to the town council, but a base for the community: young people’s venue and home to clubs or societies, offering workshops and training opportunities: the list is long and we will be coming out to ask you what that space potentially could look like.  We want to complement what is already in existence and strengthen the offering to the people in Kingswood.   This is an ambitious project and so please don’t expect to see anything for at least a year.

So what next?

We are still in our set up phase and creating the structures and staffing team to support the exciting projects.  We want to have a secure base on which we can develop the councillors, make us more accessible and visible and start collaborating with the people of Kingswood.

How do I get involved?

If you want to know more, please visit our website where we list all our meeting dates.  Or email a councillor or speak to the town clerk who can keep you abreast of our plans.   From time to time as councillors’ circumstances change there are vacancies on the council.  They will be advertised on our website, and you might just be able to pique your appetite to get involved yourself.

Our meetings are on the second Tuesday of each month, at 7pm in The Park Centre.  The public are always welcome.