Council tax in Denbighshire will go up by 6.35% as members of the authority formally adopted the new rates.

At a meeting of the full council on Tuesday councillors also considered the amounts that will be made up by cash for community councils and the police.

The tax hike will see band D property owners in the county paying £72.24 extra a year or £1.52 a week.

The cash strapped council has a budget shortfall of £10.5 million to deal with and became the second council in Wales to introduce monthly bin collection which it says will save £800,000.

Councillors also approved a budget with savings of £5.67 million last month, including £1.32 million from the schools budget.

Ruthin county councillor, Huw Hilditch-Roberts, said: “This is not the rate that we wanted to set as a council. But we have to be realistic and we are protecting services. It is one of the lowest in Wales, if you look at Conwy it could be double what we’ve set so it is positive in that respect. However our libraries are being protected, our schools are still being invested in and there is no loss of front line services.”

But Denbigh county councillor, Glenn Swingler, said: “We are against the rise in council tax. Again we are hitting the poorest in our society, the working poor. “We’ve also a rise in council house rents adding to further costs. And we’re cutting services and losing jobs. It’s an absurd situation that can’t carry on as it is.”

In January the council found out that it would not be getting anymore money than it had in the previous year for the 2019/20 budget in the Welsh Government settlement.

The settlement is the money that the Welsh Government grants to councils to fund their business which in Denbighshire accounts for almost three quarters of its budget.

Cllr Julian Thompson-Hill the lead member for finance, felt the Welsh Government settlement was forcing the council to raise council tax.

He said: “We got a cash flat settlement from the Welsh Government. To put that into context to meet the pressures we are facing we would have needed an increase in the region of five per cent but we never expected that was going to happen. In terms of council tax we appreciate the impact that council tax has on individuals. I would never seek to impose a council tax increase of one penny more than it needs to be to deliver an appropriate level of services. “There is a balance that needs to be met and the budget that we have put forward hits that balance as close as best as we can. But each year it becomes more and more difficult to find savings that aren’t going to directly impact on residents.”

A Welsh Government spokesman said: “We have offered local government the best settlement possible in this ninth year of austerity, mitigating the reduction councils had been expecting.  As a result of the decisions we’ve made, the 1% reduction announced at the 2018-19 final budget has turned into 0.2% increase in general funding for local government. Included in this is £3.5 million of funding for a settlement floor so that no local authority faces a reduction of more than 0.3% in its core funding over 2018-19.”