Questions raised over descent of RBWM finances into 'urgent' state

Questions were raised over how the Royal Borough’s finances have ended up in their current precarious state at a cabinet meeting on Wednesday night.

Latest council figures show a forecast overspend on services of more than £7.39million.

Cabinet member for finance, Councillor Lynne Jones, said officers have ‘worked very hard’ to try and bring that overspend figure down.

The month-six figure showed an improvement of £1million compared to month five, due to reduced contract costs, projects costs and increased income, she said.

However, in month seven, increased demand in adult services, due to additional complex needs added to the costs.

There have been big increases in the cost of care, accounting for £3million.

In addition, there were audit fees of £400,000 – largely because the finance team has been ‘under-resourced for some time.’

Debt continues to be an issue.

Leader of the council Simon Werner lamented the fact that 10 per cent of the Borough’s budget is being spent on just servicing the debt it has inherited.

Cllr Jones said: “We will need to address the repayment of the debt, because over the last four years we have only serviced the debt, not repaid any of it.”

She added: “The difference between last year’s budget and this one is that there are no savings that haven’t had an implementation plan with it.

“Even if there may be some hard-to-deliver savings, they’re still viable.”

Cllr Helen Price (tBfI, Clewer and Dedworth East) noted that what has been revealed over the past few months is the Borough ‘hasn’t had robust processes in place.’

Among other problems, it ‘has not harnessed the power of IT’, expenses were understated, and incomes overstated, she said.

“[This came] to pass in an organisation that’s been in existence for decades, has Government-appointed auditors who haven’t spotted anything [and] an S151 officer – not current – who thought everything was OK.

“I understand we had an interim MD (managing director) whose sole purpose was to make sure we had a robust budget.

“My question is how [has this happened]?”

Cllr Jones attributed ‘a huge part’ of the problem to a ‘hollowing out of the
officer core’.

She said there is a third of the number of officers compared to what there used to be.

She said this meant officers have had to focus on the ‘day to day’ tasks rather than long term concerns or bigger strategic aims.

“When you cut staff to the extent that staff have been cut within the borough, there just isn’t enough hours of officer time to cover everything and things are going to slip,” she said.

“That’s led to us not being on top of things. It’s not down to the officers themselves because they have done their best.”

The borough is recruiting officers and Cllr Jones says it has a ‘strong leadership team’ now.