York Labour has criticised planned cuts to services for vulnerable adults and children in the council’s budget for the coming year.

Main opposition group leader Cllr Claire Douglas also highlighted the state of the city’s roads after the release of City of York Council’s draft budget papers.

Bosses have identified £8 million worth of cuts and savings to be made from 2023-2025 as the council faces “unprecedented” pressure.

This includes around £2.5 million taken from adult and children’s social budgets, Labour said, while £1.75 million is to be taken from the council’s five year highways budget to pay for anti-terror bollards in the city centre.

Cllr Douglas said: “The Liberal Democrat-Green parties’ budget once again cuts millions out of crucial services for vulnerable adults and children at a time when the council is sitting on millions in developer payments that remain unspent.”

Developer payments, known as section 106 contributions, are paid to councils by developers – to fund services like parks, youth services and affordable homes – as part of their planning permission.

Demand for services for vulnerable adults and children continues to rise – and the council is to add £5 million to those departments’ budgets next year to try to keep pace.

But because around two-thirds of the council’s entire budget is spent on these two groups, cutbacks are also proposed.

Discussing the plans for 2023/24 in his decision session on Thursday, finance chief Cllr Nigel Ayre said years of austerity followed by Covid meant there was “no low hanging fruit anymore”, with back office services already “cut to the bone”.

“It simply isn’t the case that there is fat to be cut,” he added. “Any cuts that local authorities face will dig into services.”

Council tax is set to rise by 4.99 per cent, though Cllr Ayre said the gain to the council could easily be wiped out by inflation, which is already hitting budgets across all departments.

He added that the need to produce a balanced budget meant that savings were necessary.

Commenting further on the budget, Cllr Douglas added: “Residents continue to see the quality of York’s roads deteriorate at a time when the Liberal Democrats and Green parties running the council have approved cuts in the coming years to highways repair schemes.

“The highways budget has been raided to help give permanence to their expensive and discriminatory blue badge holder city centre access ban, showing an administration focused much more on its own priorities and much less on those of the York residents it is supposed to serve”.

In total, the council is spending £3.5 million on hostile vehicle mitigation measures in the city centre, with work set to start in the coming months.

The controversial measures have seen blue badge holders permanently banned from parking in the city’s footstreets.

Counter-terrorism experts and the council argue this is necessary for security, but a range of campaigning York organisations and the Labour group say this discriminates against disabled people and are calling on the council to reverse the ban.

The council’s budget proposals will be debated and voted on at a meeting of full council on February 23.

Opposition parties will come up with their own budget proposals in the coming weeks.

The budget proposals can be read here: https://democracy.york.gov.uk/ieListDocuments.aspx?CId=875&MId=13884