Residents of Henbury will have received their Council Tax notice for 2025/26 recently. Cheshire East Council are facing severe financial challenges that have been widely reported in the media. The Government have recently stepped in offering financial assistance of £25.3 million for the coming year to ensure a balanced budget. A further £17.3m has been provided for the current year to the council to avoid a section 114 notice when a council is unable to meet its obligations.
Henbury Parish Council have a good working dialogue with Cheshire East officers. It is evident that due to the pressures the council faces, cuts to services that residents would normally expect to be provided by CEC are no longer available. In some circumstances the Parish Council has taken over the funding of services or introduced services for the benefit of the community. Henbury Parish Council set the precept before the Government announced it would step in to help CEC and certain assumptions were made from local sources as to the further cuts we would face to services such as bin collection, weeding of roads and footpaths.
Recent and ongoing examples of Henbury Parish Council support are
- Winter Gritting and ploughing of major roads
- Upgrade and Maintenance of local footpaths
- Removal and pruning of trees impacting the highway
- Cutting back hedgerows on footpaths.
- Increased funding to the Millennium Green Trust
- Village maintenance of public areas
- Autumn leaf removal
- Lower Car park waste bin provision
- Bus shelter maintenance
- Community planting schemes throughout Henbury
- Largest ever community fibre broadband scheme in the uk to date that took councillors over three years and many hundreds of hours work with over £342,000 of works carried out at no cost to the community.
- In addition, the council have successfully managed to have siding works carried out on the footpath between Pepper Street and Rough Heys lane.
- Recent water supply disruptions are finally being addressed by United Utilities after several months of ongoing dialogue
- The Parish Council continue to address the unacceptable flooding issues on Church Lane by the sub station.
The Parish Council are in receipt of section S106 monies due to recent housing developments within the parish. Consequently, the Parish Council have sought to increase the precept for 2025/26 so that working in conjunction with Cheshire East Council we may address the state of certain infrastructure elements such as pavements and footpaths that are long overdue attention.
If we do not use the significant funds allocated to the Parish Council within a five year window then all monies have to be returned to the developer. It is for this reason that councillors unanimously agreed to have a larger increase in the precept to assist with the funding.
The parish Council reduced the precept by 12.8% last year to maintain a balanced budget.
It should be noted that the following precept levels have applied in Henbury to a Band F property in recent years.
| Year | Amount | Increase/Decrease |
|---|---|---|
| 2020/21 | £76.97 | n/a |
| 2021/22 | £88.98 | 15.6% |
| 2022/23 | £91.53 | 2.9% |
| 2023/24 | £90.25 | -1.4% |
| 2024/25 | £78.68 | -12.8% |
The precept for an F property is now £102.14 a 29% increase however compared to 2022/23 this is an 11% increase.
If you are interested in taking a more active role in the village, then how about becoming a Parish Councillor. To learn more please consider having an informal chat with either David Nuttall (Chair) or Mike Wood (Deputy Chair). Their contact details are on the Parish Council part of this website