Council agree Budget for 2025-26
All of our Town Councillors and staff are passionate about Newbiggin by the Sea. We will continue to work hard to ensure Newbiggin by the Sea is a pleasant place to live, visit, and work, with a safer and cleaner environment, as well as provide opportunities for the town and community to thrive.
We will continue to focus on our core service delivery. Our aim in the future is to reach a point where the precept at a minimum covers our core services. This will allow us to focus on improving the maintenance of what we already have in place or replacing those that have been vandalised. We continue to look to restoration work at Newbiggin Memorial Park.
As always, any other projects that we may consider pursuing will be reliant on the ability to secure external funding.
It should be noted that NO money comes to the Town Council through business rates.
Over 90% of households in Newbiggin by the Sea are Band A, although Band D is a national comparator. From all the authorities listed on your Council Tax bill, the Town Council is the only authority where the money stays 100% in Newbiggin by the Sea. We are transparent about how this money is spent by providing a detailed budget and publishing details of all payments that are made, this can be found on our website under ‘Financial Information’ – https://www.newbiggintowncouncil.gov.uk/administration/financial-information/https://www.newbiggintowncouncil.gov.uk/administration/financial-information/
Prior to 2024/25 we manged to freeze our precept despite rises in costs and inflation by using money that we have in General Reserves. Due to this freeze in our precept we saw our general reserves depleted. We need to continue to build our Reserves this year to be Earmarked for planned asset replacement in the future and other contingencies.
At a meeting held on 8th January 2025 the Town Council agreed to set a budget of £312,260 and request a precept of £305,586 for 2025-2026.
This new precept will equate to £132.34 for Band A (£8.66 increase for the year – 17p per week increase) and £198.51 for Band D (£12.99 increase for the year – £0.25p per week).
This decision comes as the council takes proactive measures to safeguard essential services and community assets in response to growing financial pressures. This is only our second increase in 6 years. This information is broken down into budget headings and submitted with our precept request to Northumberland County Council.
This information is broken down into the following budget headings and submitted with our precept request to Northumberland County Council.
A detailed breakdown of our budget is available here:
A non-exhaustive list of services we provide is available here, it also details the services of Northumberland County Council. 
