This one decision by hundreds of small Devon councils could impact your finances

Everyone starts to pay a bit more attention when they realise the decisions councils are making might hit them in the pocket.

And that’s why more people might be tuning into what’s happening in their local town halls right now, as it’s budget-setting time.
Honiton Town Council has already captured headlines by proposing a 49.9 per cent hike in its share, or precept, to use the formal term, of the council tax bill.
The council has outlined clear reasons why it wants to progress with such a big increase – including preparing for the major shake-up about to hit Devon’s local government and a need to bolster its reserves – but it has prompted the resignation of now former councillor, Joanne Fotheringham.
Interestingly, Honiton might not be alone, as there are some other town and parish councils eyeing significant hikes, too.
Number crunching
While the idea of reams of spreadsheets chock-full of numbers might make many want to glaze over, now is a vital time in the council calendar because their finance bods are trying to work out how much money they need for the year ahead.
To meet often rising costs, councils need to earn more money, and one of the few proverbial levers they can pull is council tax, which is paid by homeowners and represents a significant source of town hall income.
Town and parish councils, like Honiton, don’t have formal limits on how much they can increase their precept by, but are encouraged to provide justification where large hikes are proposed.
The other precepts that combine to make up the council tax bill come from Devon County Council (for Devon residents outside Plymouth and Torbay), a district council, such as South Hams or East Devon, the Devon & Cornwall Police and Crime Commissioner, and the Devon and Somerset Fire & Rescue Service.
Those other precepting bodies are subject to limits on how much they can increase council tax by per year.
The precepts are added together to create a total, the amount of which is billed to residents based on the council tax band their property sits in, with the range going from A for lower rated properties through to H for the largest – including the Royal Residence at Buckingham Palace, according to government data.
But big spikes in precepts are being witnessed in a rising number of parish councils, many of whom are fearful about what extra responsibilities they might have to soon take on.
Uncertain future
That concern comes from the ongoing process of local government reorganisation, or LGR for short.
This is the biggest shake-up of local councils in 50 years, and will likely leave Devon with just three large councils compared to its 11 now.
Because of that huge change, there are worries that those new larger councils will either want to jettison certain responsibilities or simply won’t have the time or space to consider them.
In such a scenario, the fear goes, the smallest councils on the local democracy rung – parishes and towns – will have to pick up the slack.
And to do that, they need money.
“All parish and town councils are aware of the LGR spectre, and the Somerset examples of where many town services, like theatres and parks, were offered to town councils, so the smaller parishes may be considering [such things], as well as others such as grass cutting or public toilet maintenance,” said Councillor Steve Keable (Liberal Democrat, Creedy, Taw and Mid Exe), a member of both Devon County Council and Mid Devon District Council.
“Consequently, active parish and town councils are mindful of LGR happening in just over two years, and are preparing their budgets for managing the yet unknown impacts and to avoid major one-off council tax hikes in a couple of years.
“LGR will not save money – it will shift the focus of who pays. Unlike district and county councils, which have a legal limit to raising council tax, parish and town councils are not capped.”
While the parish or town precept is unlikely to be the largest portion within any Devon resident’s council tax bill, increases in it nevertheless make a difference to the total that has to be paid.
And so residents in other areas might want to turn their attention to the next finance-related or full council meetings at their local town hall.
Complex picture
There are hundreds of parishes in Devon alone, with the Devon Association of Local Councils stating there are 361 parish councils, and an additional 42 ‘parish meetings’ which cover areas where no parish council exists. 
That makes it extremely difficult to discern an average rise among Devon’s parishes, or to spot any trends.
But a random sample shows that the direction of parish and town precepts is definitely up.
Over in Axminster, a Band D property looks set to be paying £188.37 in the new financial year for the parish precept, an increase of £17.12 per year, equivalent to roughly 10 per cent.
In the South Hams, Totnes is weighing a 7.5 per cent rise or 10 per cent rise, while Dartmouth’s precept rose by 11 per cent this year – albeit no decision has been made for the 2026/27 financial year.
In Ivybridge, the precept looks to be rising by nearly 12 per cent, while Okehampton is essentially flat with a 53p drop per year for a Band D home.
Bigger rises are occurring elsewhere, though, with Cullompton agreeing a 27 per cent rise in its total precept amount (with Band D homes seeing their bills likely to rise to £184.89 from £148.41), and Bovey Tracy heading for a roughly 31 per cent hike in its total precept, which the town council has described as an extra 62p per week for a Band D home “to help cover unavoidable costs so the town council can stay in good shape for the future”.
A raft of other town halls will be deciding their precept rises soon.
But some context is vital here.
The percentage rises can be slightly distorting: Even Honiton’s 49.9 per cent proposed precept rise is £80 per year – taking the Band D precept from £163.32 now to £243.43 in the 2026/27 financial year.
Also, parishes and towns, by their very nature, contain fewer residents than a district, county, or police or fire administrative boundary. That means a much smaller number of residents have to help if costs rise, and depending on the parish’s property make-up, it might not have many Band H properties, meaning the burden falls on other bands.
Anecdotally, many parishes and towns have been doing more with less for as long as their councillors can remember, and with LGR on the horizon, many are fearing that imbalance could get even worse.
The Local Government Association has asked the government what the role of parishes and unitaries will be amid the new unitary world.
The Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government said it did “recognise the value that town and parish councils offer to their local communities”.
“We want to see every local authority hardwiring local community engagement into their own structures, through approaches like neighbourhood area committees.,” it said.
“As such, we have asked councils to outline in their final proposals their plans for neighbourhood-based governance, the impact on parish councils, and the role of formal neighbourhood partnership and neighbourhood area committees.”