Before the meeting started the Mayor led a minute's reflection on the terrible events that had happened in Israel over the weekend and to spare a thought of all those still affected by the awful situation that was continuing there.

To receive any apologies for absence

Apologies for absence were recorded for Councillors Gosling and Majeed.

It was noted that Councillors Blundell and Cross were in attendance remotely and took no part in the vote on any item.

To receive any declarations of interest

There were none declared.

Please note public questions are permitted at Extraordinary meetings of the Council where such a question is directly related to an item on the Agenda.

The Council will set aside a period of 30 minutes to deal with public questions, which may be extended at the discretion of the Mayor in exceptional circumstances. The Member who provides the initial response will do so in writing. The written response will be published as a supplement to the agenda by 5pm one working day before the meeting. The questioner shall be allowed up to one minute to put a supplementary question at the meeting. The supplementary question must arise directly out of the reply provided and shall not have the effect of introducing any new subject matter. A Member responding to a supplementary question will have two minutes to respond.

a)   This question was withdrawn.

The Mayor confirmed that Mr Baldwin’s question and supplementary had been withdrawn in advance of the meeting.

b)    Fiona Tattersall of Riverside ward asked the following question of Councillor Jones, Deputy Leader of the Council and Cabinet Member for Finance

The residents of RBWM have been told there is a debt of £203 million. Over how many years has this been accumulated and why?

Written response: The debt has been accumulated since 1998 when the new RBWM Unitary Council inherited a share of Berkshire County Council Debt and Outstanding loans relating to this particular debt amount to £3.2m.

Councils regularly use, and indeed are advised to use, available internal cash to fund capital projects in order to avoid incurring interest charges which means that borrowing dates do not neatly align with the purchase of assets making it more difficult to directly relate individual drawdowns to spend. Looking at cost lines over 4m there has been some high value items such as:

School Expansions and maintenance            53m

Although there would be government funding for a proportion of school expansion projects. There are just under 900 lines of capital spend over the last 10 years.

In 2019 we were told the debt would be repaid by 2024. By 2020 published papers indicated that this debt would be paid back from £425m of capital receipts and grants by 2035. The rising value of debt over the last decade is shown in the table below:

Fiona Tattersall asked, through the Mayor, for clarification that there was only £3.2 million of the loans taken out to pay the original old County Council debt left on the council books.

Councillor Jones confirmed that the residue of the original loans amounted to £3.2m.

c)    Andrew Hill of Boyn Hill ward asked the following question of Councillor Jones, Deputy Leader of the Council and Cabinet Member for Finance

Currently the council's debts stand at £203m. The impression I got from recent meetings was that Cabinet were unsure how all these debts were incurred. Does RBWM have best value reports underpinning all of these expenditures, and why are income generating assets like community centres left empty or demolished?

Written response: The increase in debt can be seen from 2016 to 2020. Councils regularly use, and indeed are advised to use, available internal cash to fund capital projects in order to avoid incurring interest charges which means that borrowing dates do not neatly align with the purchase of assets making it more difficult to directly relate individual drawdowns to spend.

However, CIPFA, in their 2020 Report stated that their overall concern was ‘that  ...  view the full minutes text for item 33.

To consider the update on the Council’s current financial position provided to Cabinet on 27 September 2023 and the following motion:

This Council supports the actions being taken by the Cabinet and senior leadership team to reduce the financial deficit facing the Council and agrees all councillors need to take responsibility for ensuring the Council does all it can to increase its financial sustainability. 

The Council discussed the update on the Council’s current financial position. The Mayor referred the councillors present to the series of slides which had been circulated with the agenda and noted that all councillors had received an in depth briefing from the Chief Executive and the Section 151 Officer before the meeting.

Councillor Jones, Deputy Leader of the Council and Cabinet Member for Finance explained that she was proposing the slightly altered motion because the background report was written in her name, as discussed at Cabinet. Councillor Jones proposed the following motion:

This Council supports the actions being taken by the Cabinet and senior leadership team to reduce the financial deficit facing the Council and agrees all councillors need to take responsibility for ensuring this Council does all it can to achieve financial sustainability.

Councillor Jones spoke to the motion explaining that the report detailed the current forecast for the years outturn was an overspend of £7.3m that reduces to £3.6m when all contingency funding had been allocated. This would reduce reserves to £6.6m which was below the minimum requirement of £7.9m as set in February 2023. The budget gap for 2024/25 currently sat at £6.2m. Officers and lead members were working hard to bring that down and much of this work would be seen in the draft budget due to be considered at Cabinet in November. She stated that the scale of the budget gaps put the Council at risk of a Section 114 notice unless urgent action was taken.

She stated that the causes were self-evident: higher than budgeted inflation had added a £1m pressure to contracts; the high level of debt compared to revenue budget had increased borrowing costs which meant this was now forecast to be £8m this year and £14m next; as well as the increasing demand and cost for social care. She continued that when also factoring in recruitment difficulties, made worse by this council’s salaries being lower than neighbouring councils resulting to the use of more expensive agency staff and the indication that a number of ‘high risk’ savings were unlikely to be achieved this added another £2m pressure. She referred to this as a perfect storm which the low level of reserves, at £10.2m, could not absorb. She stated that the Administration and officers had put together a plan to get the council out of the inherited mess but it must be implemented and must succeed.

She had reflected on the budget approved in February 2020, when the officers made an ‘at risk’ statement and reread the comments around closing the budget gap. She noted that at paragraph 9.5 the report stated that there was considerable uncertainty around the size and scale of future budget gaps and that RBWM was already a low spending council that restrained it from reducing costs. Councillor Jones set out the seven principles proposed in 2020 noting that it was difficult to measure any success as financial resilience had not improved. She stated that given those principles  ...  view the full minutes text for item 34.