Children in Slough’s poorest families could suffer if plans to cut council tax discounts are approved, a councillor has warned.

Slough Borough Council is considering reducing council tax discounts currently given to low-income households. Proposed changes mean that households not in work will have to pay an average of £468 a year while council tax for low-paid households will rise by an average of £279.

But Labour opposition councillor Christine Hulme said she had a ‘great concern’ about how the cut would hit low-income families, and ‘particularly the impact on children’.

Councillor Hulme said: “We have the largest proportion of children in relative and absolute low-income families in Berkshire as a whole.

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“[A total of] 6,500 households will be affected by the policy – which is not an insignificant number of people. That is a lot of people for a small town."

She added: “We have a great concern about the impact this is going to have on family finances and particularly the impact on children.”

Councillor Hulme was speaking to a meeting of Slough Borough Council’s cabinet – its committee of leading Conservative councillors - on Thursday, November 14.

The cabinet voted to launch a consultation on the proposed changes, with final proposals to be voted on at a meeting of all councillors in February.

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The council currently operates a sliding scale of discounts for households on low incomes under its council tax support scheme – with unemployed people exempt from paying.

But under the proposed changes, unemployed households would have to pay 30 per cent of a full council tax bill – costing them an average £468 a year.

Other homes to be hit include those on incomes between £115.38 and £461.53 a week. On average, the cuts to the discounts would mean an average increase of £279 a year for families who receive them.

Plans say the changes could raise an extra £1.7 million a year for the cash-strapped council – although this doesn’t account for any council tax that might go unpaid.

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The council would also introduce a hardship fund of one-off payments for anyone affected by the changes who is struggling to pay.

Council leader Dexter Smith said the changes would bring Slough’s discounts closer to those offered by other councils in Berkshire.

He said: “The level of support that we were offering was the most generous in Berkshire. We argued that that was because there was greater need in Slough but interestingly our nearest demographic comparator in Berkshire, Reading, was at the lowest end of the scale.”

Annabell Scholes, the senior manager in charge of finance at Slough Borough Council, said the changes are needed because of ‘the extent of the financial challenges' that the council faces.

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She suggested that the council may need to make more ‘difficult decisions’ when it sets its budget in February next year.

She said: “We cannot underestimate the challenges we still have ahead of us to balance this budget.

“We still have our legal responsibility to close our budget gap – which unfortunately means we’ll have to bring some very difficult options forward for consideration.”