THE future of vital services in West Sussex will be at risk if the Government does not take a long-term view on local authority funding.

West Sussex County Council leader Louise Goldsmith issued the warning after her council decided to increase council tax by one per cent.

She called the decision “incredibly hard” but said it would help cope with rising demand for core services including child protection and adult social care.

The move would bring the council tax rise for West Sussex residents to 4.95 per cent – that’s the equivalent of an additional 12.6p per week for the average Band D council taxpayer.

Councillor Goldsmith said: “It could be easy to forget just how wide reaching the services we provide are.

“We are there for our residents from the day they are born until the day they die.

“We are the biggest provider of care, bar the hospitals, in the county.

“We keep our older people safe from harm and independent for longer, we keep children safe, in care and at home, we protect them and support them and we educate them.

“We are the fire and rescue service, keeping people safe in an emergency and preventing those emergencies in the first place.

“We are there to keep our county moving by keeping our roads running, our potholes filled.”

Cllr Goldsmith said it was important to plan ahead.

She said: “One way or another there is little part of life in West Sussex that we are not responsible for or involved in.

“None of this we do lightly.

“But we need to plan, we need to be able to continue to evolve and grow as the issues and demands change and we simply can’t do that with a short-term view of our finances.

“It is wrong for us, and county councils across the country, to continue to have to be reliant on taxing our residents in the current piecemeal way every year to attempt to plug the gap left by central Government.

“We have played our part well when Government asked us to and taken more than 30 per cent out of our budget at exactly the same time as demand and need rises.

“We are not alone in West Sussex. This is a national problem that deserves a national answer. I, and many other council leaders, have been asking for years for a long term solution to local government finances.”