Dear resident, your council tax bill is going up

“Dear resident, your council tax bill is going up and before you ask: no, you may not personally see anything extra for your money and yes, we know things are already tight thanks to the rising cost of living.”

Not really the easiest message to have to land, is it?

But instead of sending out bills (which, like many places, included an unwelcome rise of 4.99%) and then just running away to hide, we instead used it as an opportunity to look residents in the eye and try to explain to them where their money actually goes (spoiler alert, it’s not just potholes and bins) and why that’s the case.

Over recent years, we’ve pulled together a booklet to send out alongside bills (helpfully piggy-backing onto the delivery costs, so we only have to pay the 15p per booklet printing cost) to provide updates on key council projects and priorities. But this year, in the face of a cost-of-living crisis and people perhaps being more cynical than ever as to what they actually get for their money, we wanted to take a different approach. Residents have a right to know how we spend their money and we wanted to do this in as clear a way as possible. 

In Swindon, around 80% of our budget is spent on social care – but the majority of residents won’t use or even know about these services until perhaps they or someone they know needs to use them. I certainly didn’t know the half of what social care actually involves – nor the eye-watering costs of delivering some of the care packages we provide. 

Our cabinet were really keen that we focussed on this message – so what better place to get this across than on the front cover itself? In previous booklets, we’ve included artist impressions of shiny regeneration projects but this time, we wanted to, for want of a better phrase, really smack people round the face with the reality of where most of their money goes: social care. We put this message in bold text on the cover, along with vibrant colours which we hope will draw people in to read on – but, if they do nothing more than give the cover a cursory glance, at least we stand a good chance of getting our main message across first.

The booklet then opens with a pie chart to show how our budget is divvied up across services – the colours used to represent each service in the chart are then carried through the rest of the booklet to make it really obvious to residents where the money is spent. We’ve included case studies of some of the adults and children we support in Swindon and how much this care costs to provide. We also included details of how much of the council’s day-to-day budget is actually available to spend on universal services like waste and recycling collections (3.24%) and fixing potholes (1.32%).

The last couple of pages have a different colour background to the rest of the booklet – that’s because this section talks about where else we get money from, separate to council tax. We want to, slowly but surely, make sure that residents understand that, for instance, the £30m road project taking place over here – that they may or may not think is a good idea – hasn’t actually been paid for by their council tax, it’s been given to us by the government, and can’t be spent on anything else. 

Then we get to the back cover which is a ‘receipt’ in the form of an online banking account on someone’s phone to illustrate how much, in pounds and pennies, each council service gets from every £1,000 of council tax we receive. Adult Services top the list (£506.01), closely followed by Children’s Services (£290.87). 

So, how’s it landing? Having worked really hard on this product with colleagues over the last few months, I was a little nervous for it to finally be out there in the world, bracing myself for people to pick holes in every page. But, it was sent out to 88,000 households (and emailed to approximately 12,000 people) a few weeks ago now and… things have been quiet. No noise from residents. No noise from councillors. Any feedback we’ve had has been positive, so we’re chalking all of this up as a real win.

Learnings and lightbulb moments

• Don’t do something in the same way just because it’s what you’ve always done. But make sure you take your key stakeholders with you – engage them early and share drafts before you get too far down the road. When I took an early design concept to our senior leaders, I braced myself ready to defend why we hadn’t gone with the usual corporate colours or typical front cover – but I didn’t have to. Because as soon as they saw it, they knew it met the brief of getting the ‘80% on social care’ key message across clearly.
   
• Getting familiar with local authority finances and how it all works can actually be (say it quietly) interesting. And the more we understand it, the more we can help our residents get to grips with it, too.
   
• If you can’t understand something, other residents won’t be able to either. Simple as. Sounds obvious, but if a sentence needed me to really concentrate on it when I was proofing the booklet, we knew it needed to be simplified. 

Please do check out our booklet – we’re pretty proud of it. But if you spot any typos, I don’t want to know!

Emma Pocock is communications lead at Swindon Borough Council. This post was originally published at Comms2point0.co.uk. Read the original post.