Latest News

Message from the Chief Executive

Released on 14 Mar 2008

As you will be aware, we have now finished the budget process for this year and the annual Council Tax leaflet has been sent out. A lot of effort went into ensuring that the political parties were given good quality information from which to make their choices and this year's Council Tax setting processes worked well. Councillors agreed to raise Council Tax by 4% which means you pay £10 more this year or 18p per week on the average Council Tax Bill for our services.

If you live in an average Band D home in Oxford then we spend £250 of your total Council Tax bill on the services we provide. These services include:

• Maintain 1,000 hectares of parks, green spaces, play areas and 8 Leisure Centres
• Collect 47,650 tonnes of waste from 56,000 households and streets, and we currently recycle or compost a third
• Clean 48,969 km of streets
• Maintain and support 21 community centres.

We are planning to invest the additional money on improved flood prevention, continuing to support children's holiday play schemes and improving play areas, and extending our replacement tree programme. We also intend to extend our recycling services by first piloting pilot a weekly food waste programme to understand the best way to collect food waste.

In the coming year our task now is to not only deliver these new projects but also to deliver the efficiency savings that we have identified.

We have developed our ongoing priorities with your help.  Our Citizen Talkback Panel and Area Committees were surveyed, we ran a Citizens' Jury, and people were able to submit your views online. I would like to thank everyone who gave us his or her opinion.

We are looking for more people to give us their opinions on the services that we provide, so we are inviting people to join our Talkback Panel. Members of the panel are asked to complete four surveys a year. Occasionally, panel members may also be invited to take part in other forms of consultation such as telephone surveys and focus groups. If you are interested then please go to our Talkback Panel Page.

Back to news listing