Orkney Islands Council is tackling a significant budget challenge over the next three years.

We face not only reducing budgets but also rising costs and an increasing demand on our services.   This is not a challenge that is unique to Orkney - it is being felt across the public sector in Scotland and the UK.

To balance our budget for 2024/2025 we agreed to take up to £20m from the Strategic Reserve Fund.

This continuing draw at this level from our reserves is unsustainable and needs to become ‘the last resort’.

To maintain a balanced budget, we have set a savings target set of £9m over the next three years – as well as reducing the use of reserves. We aim to reduce our use of our reserves to £18m for 2025/2026, with further reduction planned for the future. This will bring the use of reserves to a more sustainable level which will ensure that we can continue to provide vital service into the future.

The budget setting strategy around this will focus on three specific areas:

• increasing the income for the Council
• increasing our charges
• changing the way that services are provided

At the heart of this decision making is a commitment to the overall protection of our essential services, to ensure that they are still available to you and your loved ones in the years to come.

We are listening to our communities because you must be involved in the decisions that affect you. We are therefore gathering local views on our proposals as we begin to plan for our budget setting process in February.

The survey questions are based on proposals which are more general – in that they will have some kind of impact on everyone - but there are other proposals behind this for which more tailored consultation and communication will be carried out. 

The survey will take around 15 minutes to complete and the results will be fed back to elected members to help with their decision making.

We are grateful for the time you are taking on this.