COUNCIL tax bills for the forthcoming year will soon be dropping on the doormats of Hampshire residents. And a survey of local councils reveals that most have kept them below the average three per cent predicted across the country.

But the low rises come at a price.

Across Hampshire hundreds of council jobs are to go, services will be slashed and millions of pounds of efficiency savings are needed to balance the books.

Southampton, which this week lost its top four-star rating just a year after achieving it, has yet again found itself having to take some of the most severe action to plug a huge £11m hole in its £179m budget.

The council is cutting a raft of services and shedding 128 jobs and council chiefs are already warning of a £12m shortfall next year.

Tory council leaders in the city blame the Government. They say the two per cent rise in funding it gives the council is among the lowest in the country and it fails to cover the increased cost of services and staff wages, not to mention additional responsibilities and falling income due to the recession.

Cabinet member for finance, councillor Jeremy Moulton claims the city is getting an “unfair deal”.

And they point to similar-sized authorities in the north who appear to get a better share of funding per resident from grants and redistributed business rates.

But in an interview with the Daily Echo former city council leader and Test MP Alan Whitehead insisted the council was not “uniquely badly served” by Government.

The council leader from 1984 to 1992, said while Southampton was not the most “lavishly funded” authority it was by no means the worst.

And he claimed Government funding formulas – based on population and need – meant Southampton did “quite well compared to other cities.”

He said: “The figures don’t bear out that everywhere up north gets a big slab of funding. It’s not a pattern you can sustain. It’s perceived that different parts of the country do better but that’s not borne out by any decent analysis.”

Mr Whitehead said the issue of whether the overall pot of Government funding for town halls needs to be larger was a separate argument.

Daily Echo: Council tax rises across Hampshire. He said the chief problem for Southampton was the “deal” the council got when it was established as a unitary authority in 1997. He said it wasn’t allocated enough money to pay for the responsibilities it inherited, and that wider boundaries would have helped it get better economies of scale.

Southampton, then a borough council which collected the bins, handled planning, council housing and environmental health, took on the county’s responsibilities in the city for schools, roads and social services.

And the new authority’s small size left it particularly vulnerable to unplanned demand, Mr Whitehead said.

However he said councillors and finance chiefs should have done a better job of managing resources in the longer term, rather than making shortterm cuts each year.

He said the Government’s three-year funding settlements should help planning in the future. Mr Whitehead also responded to claims the council was not getting enough money to pay for eastern European immigration in recent years, which some estimate is as high as 26,000 – one tenth of the city’s population.

He said that while there was a lag in picking up “rapid” population movements, the impact of the “undercounting”

was complicated, and the demand on services exaggerated.

“The idea that that completely throws Southampton’s budget is not right,” he said.