Progress on finances

Slough Council has made a ‘huge amount of progress’ as it deals with its financial pressures but there is still ‘a huge amount of work to do’, Wednesday’s meeting heard.

The local authority needs to make at least £20million in savings a year to pay off its spiralling debts following years of financial mismanagement.

At this week’s cabinet meeting, lead member for finance Councillor Rob Anderson (Lab, Britwell and Northborough) said that SBC still has a long road ahead of it as it looks to reach the ‘Promised Land’ of financial stability.

The council required a ‘capitalisation direction’ from Government, which would enable it to sell off millions of pounds’ worth of assets to meet its deficit.

Those at the meeting learned that this is estimated to reduce from a potential total of £782million to £369million; a ‘considerable reduction’.

This has been made possible due to ‘improved and accelerated’ asset sales and council tax income, cabinet heard.

Cllr Anderson said that his aim was to get to a position whereby in the 2024/25 budget, the council faced debt of about £8/9million – a figure which most other local authorities would expect to have.

He urged colleagues to press ahead with delivering mass savings across the council, adding that if these were not achieved, SBC would be back into a ‘vicious circle’.

“There is a huge amount of progress but that sets us up for a huge amount of work,” Cllr Anderson said.

“We have got an achievable plan and it is not going to be easy, it is going to require us to sell an awful lot of assets at pace to get us to that Promised Land.

“There is a journey that we can see and if we follow the strategy we will be in a much better position as a result.”