COUNCIL taxpayers are to face a significantly smaller increase in their county council share of the bill this year.

Kent County Council says bills will rise by 5.2 per cent, much lower than the 12.5 per cent hike householders faced last year.

County Hall’s ruling Conservative administration said its spending plans for 2004-2005 would equate to an increase of £42 on Band D homes – the average - or 82 pence per week.

For those homes in Band C, the increase will be the equivalent of 73 pence per week. The largest number of homes across the county are in this band.

The single figure hike will bring some relief to hard-pressed council taxpayers but average bills are still likely to exceed £1,000 once the district council, parish council and police authority components of the bill are added in.

Kent and Medway Fire Authority will for the first time also set its own levy for the fire service.

The more modest KCC increase will come at a price, however. Around 150 jobs are to be axed. Although of those are part of 300 announced last year, 75 more employees are to be made redundant.

Most of those jobs will be lost from administrative departments and KCC insists that despite a savings package totalling some £16million, key public services have been safeguarded.

Conservative county council leader Sir Sandy Bruce-Lockhart said KCC had tried to strike the right balance between protecting services and keeping council tax rises down.

He warned KCC’s finances would continue to come under pressure, chiefly as a result of a shake-up in the way the Government allocated money to councils, which had seen local authorities in the south east lose out to those in the north and Midlands.

Over the next three years, KCC expects to be £56million worse off as a result of those changes – a scenario which Sir Sandy said was “totally unjustified.”

Sir Sandy said: “In the face of this and other pressures like national public sector inflation, we have delivered a 5.2 per cent council tax increase that will provide a real investment in key services. This has been achieved by our continual drive to bureaucracy and waste.”

Council tax payers would be “relieved” that KCC had not gone beyond the Government’s own forecast of an average increase of around 7.3per cent.

He accepted cutting red tape and administration costs would become more difficult in the coming years.

Opposition Labour group leader Cllr Mike Eddy said KCC had managed to set a “reasonable” council tax increase only because of a more generous settlement from the Government.

“The increase is still above inflation but they have got it down to a level that Government can accept,” he stressed.

Sir Sandy told KM-fm how the authority was able to get its council tax down to the new level...