Council set to lose £10 million from 2025/26 grant settlement

Devon County Council faces a £10 million budget loss next year as the Government abolishes the Rural Services Delivery Grant, replacing it with a Recovery Grant targeting areas of highest deprivation.

It’s been confirmed that Devon County Council will suffer a £10 million hit to its budget next year.

Earlier this month the Government announced that it was abolishing the Rural Services Delivery Grant and wrapping it up into a new Recovery Grant that will be targeted to councils in areas with the highest deprivation.

The rural services grant provided £110 million nationally to support people in rural communities. This year we received a big chunk of that money – £10.1million – with another £4million coming to district councils and the fire service.

The Government has now announced its grant settlement to Devon for the 2025/26 financial year and confirmed that we would not get any cash at all from the new deprivation Recovery Grant.

Overall, we will see 2.05 per cent more grant funding from the Government.

Devon County Council leader, James McInnes, said:

“It’s a real disappointment that we won’t be getting any mitigation for the loss of this £10.1 million grant.

“So we are facing an immediate need to make further savings in our spending to offset the loss of this grant.

“We won’t finally set our budget for 2025/26 until next February but up to now we’d been on track to produce a balanced budget.  But we are now having to examine every area of spending to make even more savings.

“We all know services cost much more to provide in rural communities because of their sparse nature.

“Our bill for getting children to school is one of the highest in the country – particularly in the secondary sector where students can live miles away from their nearest school or college.

“It costs more to provide social care for our elderly and vulnerable residents because of the increased costs of carers getting from one rural village to the next rather than looking after people who live in the same street or neighbourhood.

“And we have one of the biggest road networks in the country to maintain and repair.

“Responding to last minute savings like this is never an efficient, effective or economic way of spending the money we raise from council taxpayers instead of our usual prudent planning.”