We are responsible for collecting Council Tax from Cambridge residents to help pay for the work of local councils and the emergency services.

Council Tax is a property-based tax which is payable on most domestic properties. There is one Council Tax bill per property, whether it is owned or rented, and the people who live there are normally responsible for paying it.

The council’s budget for this year has been seriously affected by financial effects of the pandemic and reduction in government revenue support grants from £5m in 2013 to nil by 2019.

Last year the total estimated cost of the pandemic on the city council alone was £18.5m, most significantly due to increased spending on housing and providing accommodation for former rough sleepers, alongside reduced income from car parking and from Cambridge Live events.

This was only partially mitigated by government grants totalling £11.3m – or just 61.3% of the additional net expenditure – leading to a shortfall of £7.2m.

Council Tax is divided between the county council, the police and crime commissioner, the fire authority and the city council. In 2022/23 our share is 10.55%.

A household living in a Band D property in Cambridge will pay £2014.66 in Council Tax from April 2022, of which £212.50 will be retained by the city council.

All changes have been set in accordance with the Referendums Relating to Council Tax Increases (Principles) (England) Report 2022/23, which specifies maximum increases by authority.

Our income

We will spend approximately £93 million delivering services in Cambridge in 2022/23.

We receive income from fees and charges for services, commercial property rents and Housing Benefit subsidy. Income also comes from your Council Tax payments, grants from the government and a share of local business rates.

We are landlord to more than 7,000 council homes, and the rents from these are kept separately to pay for housing services.

Our expenditure

In 2021 to 2022 your Council Tax has helped to pay for a wide range of services for Cambridge residents, including:

• community response to coronavirus – we continue to support our communities and mutual aid organisations in the city to mitigate the worst effects of the pandemic and to promote public health messages and vaccination uptake, to ensure that all sections of our communities could be helped and protected as far as possible. Work also continued to support the city’s Food Poverty Alliance and the running of local food hubs to ensure local organisations and volunteers could respond to Cambridge residents in need
• bins and improving recycling – Our shared waste service collected waste from just over 50,000 bins in the city, missing only 0.2% of bin collections. We diverted just over 50% of household waste from landfill and collected just over 52,000 tonnes of materials for recycling
• providing leisure facilities including indoor and outdoor swimming pools – During the year there were around 310,335 casual swims in our swimming pools and 61,590 visits to our sports facilities. Nearly 27,545 of the visits were made by people with concessionary memberships
• keeping streets and open spaces clean and tidy – We routinely maintained over one million square metres of grass and collected waste from bins in parks and open spaces. We responded to 114 reports of graffiti and 500 reports of detrimental graffiti, and removed 2,211 incidents of fly-tipping. We also responded to 370 reports of abandoned cars
• providing community centres, community development activities and a community grants programme – Just under 60,000 visits were made to our community centres, of which just over 24,000 were from priority groups, and our community grants programme allocated just over £1,036,000 to voluntary and community groups for projects to reduce social and economic disadvantage for residents with the greatest need
• dealing with antisocial behaviour and calls about noise nuisance – We dealt with a total of 706 reports of antisocial behaviour in our Antisocial Behaviour Team, of which 596 required intensive work. Our Environmental Health Service responded to 863 complaints about noise nuisance
• providing housing advice and support – The council and its partners prevented or relieved homelessness for 445 households and secured housing in the private rented sector for 166 households in housing need. We also reduced the number of rough sleepers on the official annual street count from 17 in 2020 to 14 in 2021
• collecting local taxes, and administering housing benefit and support for Council Tax – We collected £86.6m in Council Tax from over 59,056 households and £123.3m in business rates from nearly 4,450 businesses. We paid out £28.5m in housing benefit and awarded £8m in Council Tax support and made £210,000 of Discretionary Housing Payments
• planning for new developments and growth in the city and determining planning applications – In the year our shared planning service continued to take forward our Local Plan and dealt with nearly 2,700 planning applications in the city and determined 71% of major applications and 70% of non-major applications within the original or agreed extension deadlines
• managing car parks and promoting greener travel – There were nearly 1.8 million visits made to our multi-storey car parks. We continue to encourage people to use other forms of transport that will reduce our congestion and improve air quality. This includes the promotion of car clubs, to help move away from the need to own a motor vehicle, to the provision of EV charging points, to promote clean modes of travel. Additionally, the car parking service provides a ‘free at point of use’ Shopmobility service
• organising elections and managing the electoral register – During the year we managed four city-wide polls, enabling around 40,000 electors to cast their vote in a Covid-safe way. More than 18,000 people registered to vote using the online service and we canvassed over 60,000 residential properties to make sure the data held in the electoral register was up to date
• responding to your enquiries – Our customer services team handled over 247,331 transactions in the year, resolving 88% of the enquiries made by telephone on the first call.

Services we provide