Council tax in the borough will be frozen for a second year running, Kingston Council has announced. 

It means the average charge for a Band D property will stay at its 2013 level of £1,379.65.

The freeze is outlined in the council’s budget forecast for the next four years, which also announces plans to spend £1.2m on bringing 12 new police officers into Kingston town centre.

The extra officers, due to arrive in April, formed part of the Conservative administration’s election manifesto, which pledged to stamp out anti-social behaviour in Kingston.

But the authority will also have to save £37.4m between now and 2018/19 - and Kingston Council leader Kevin Davis admitted that was going to be"tough".

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He said: “We have found a balance between expenditure and spending money on services that are growing fast or important to us.

“The future years are going to get tougher. The further we go in the process the harder it gets to make savings.

“We are going to look to reconfigure our services and broker a new deal about the way the council approach and works with them. I think we are going to gather debate.

“In three years time I don’t think we will be sitting here with the council doing the exact same thing that the council is doing today.”

The council has already managed to identify £13m worth of savings until 2019, mainly through budget reductions across all areas, as well as recommissioning services, generating additional income and making efficiencies. 

That includes saving £3.5m over the four years through efficiencies to the council's back room support services.  

But there remains £24m worth of savings still to find. 

But that target has been made harder after Kingston saw a 25 per cent drop in its Government grant this year - to £18.443m.

And a potential £8m saving expected through merging Kingston and Richmond Council's back room services now looks unlikley, following today's announcement that Richmond had agreed a merger with Wandsworth. 

Mayor of London Boris Johnson is expected to contribute some money towards the extra policing costs – although the council has pledged to fork out £400,000 over the next three years.

But Liberal Democrat opposition leader Liz Green said: “£400,000 for policing? Surely paying for that is Boris’ job – that’s what we pay him for. We are funding his work.”

A sum of £1.2m has also been set out to pay for older people’s residential care and £1m will be spent on funding programmes for people with learning disabilities.

The council has committed to the regeneration of Kingston with £280,000 to be spent on the Kingston Futures project – a programme of new business and residential infrastructure.

It has also created four new planning officer jobs under “unavoidable pressures” to deal with these with an allocated £169,000 each year until the 2018/19 financial year.

It also plans to spend £487,000 to improve the standards of Achieving for Children – the social enterprise company for Kingston and Richmond borough’s children services every year for the next four years.

Coun Green said: “We need to look at the detail behind these things. There are a few things that are worrying but without the details we can’t asses what the impact will be on the service or a group of residents.

“It will be a moving picture over the next few weeks.”

Kingston’s new recycling scheme that will see different recyclables collected on a fortnightly basis from next year, has also featured in the budget.

A sum of £100,000 set out to pay for communications informing residents of the changes in the upcoming financial year.

The budget also outlines a capital programme where the council hopes to improve its assets by spending £245,000 to make repairs at Kingston Crematorium and paying £100,000 for a “small additional project” to undertake works on stalls at the Ancient Market Place.

Bruce McDonald, chief executive at Kingston Council, said: “Over the next four years we need to save £37.4m, equivalent to 28 per cent of our 2014/15 net budget of £131m.

“It very much feels as if the good news is that we have just finished a marathon, but the bad news is we are being asked to go straight into running another.”