This is how much extra Nottinghamshire residents will pay in council tax after local authority votes through 3.99 per cent rise

Council tax is set to rise by 3.99 per cent in Nottinghamshire

It means people in band A properties will pay an extra £39.26 a year to the council, while those in band D homes will pay an additional £58.89.

Conservative councillors at Nottinghamshire County Council voted through the budget with the support of their coalition partners, the Mansfield Independents.

Labour had proposed changes to the budget, which would have meant the cuts to the benefits of people with disabilities would have been reversed, and the cuts to speech and language therapy and perinatal mental health support would also have been scrapped.

They called the benefit cuts ‘callous’, and said the children’s centre cuts were economically and socially short-sighted.

This would have been primarily funded by putting less into reserves.

However the Conservatives argued that this would have led to future problems and could result in financial difficulty.

The Ashfield Independent councillors also proposed an amendment which would have meant the three children’s centres in Huthwaite, Mansfield and currently due to close would have been kept open.

They argued the £100,000 cost of this was minimal in comparison with the £28 million the council intends to spend on upgrading its own offices.

However this too was rejected by the Conservatives, who said the centres were underused, and did not represent good value for money.

Coun Jason Zadrozny, who is the leader of the Ashfield Independents, and represents the Ashfields ward, said: “We have 70-year-old men making decisions about seven-years-olds. We have millionaires making decisions about single mothers.

“The Conservatives are utterly out of touch. The Conservatives hiked council tax by the maximum amount.

“In a budget of £512 million, the £100,000 we requested, to keep the three children’s centres open, is just 0.01 percent of their budget. They refused to even consider our plans to put £100,000 of funding to protect just three centres.”