I wish I could bring some season's cheer to the Isle of Wight, as we rapidly approach Christmas and the new year. 

We have had some welcome amounts of money awarded recently, which will certainly go towards several projects on the Island, notably £2m per year for ten years into Ryde, £2m for the Newport to Sandown main road for safety projects and £13.5m for the cycle way/active travel route, between Freshwater and Ryde.

All of that is going to make a difference in the coming year or two.

Where we are going to continue to struggle is on our annual funding from Government for the Island.

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Cuts to our funding started around 2010 and have continued ever since.

As a Council, roughly £3m has been cut every year since 2010 and, alongside unavoidable price increases for services, we have seen ongoing increases in charging on Council Tax and parking, for example.

In broad terms, the Isle of Wight Council has, in 2024, £90m less than it had in 2010 to spend on delivering services.

We have made our plea to Government.

An enormous amount of work and information-gathering has gone on across the Council, and we have provided what we believe is a sound case for why the Island should receive more money from Government to deliver services.

We have even quantified the amount of money we believe we need - and should have.

To date, we have not had any further money.

There has been an unhelpful change of minister recently and I have written to the new Minister, personally seeking positive news and information from him about our funding.

He has replied, but without committing to any additional money.

Instead, he has advised we need to wait for the Annual Financial Settlement process to be concluded - and then advised to local authorities across the UK. 

This is expected on December 23.

In the meantime, and without any positive indication there will be any additional funding coming to the Island, we continue to work upon setting the budget for 2024/25 which, once again, means difficult choices must be made.

The ongoing increasing demand for social care for adults and children is now taking more than three quarters of our available budget spending power.

Add a rising homelessness number into the equation and you might begin to understand how badly the Isle of Wight Council needs more money from Government just to deliver some of the most important services it is responsible for - and has no choice about delivering.

It is no comfort to us, but we are not alone. 

Other local authorities have indicated their own desperate financial positions to Government and just recently I wrote, alongside my counterpart leaders from Southampton, Portsmouth, Hampshire and Bournemouth, Poole, and Christchurch (BCP), to the Government and Minister, setting out our serious concerns about the lack of necessary funding to deliver statutory services across our region.  We had a simple reply thanking us for our letter!

I am now focussed on the December 23 financial award announcement, to see if that brings our Island the Christmas present, we all want and must have.