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a)   This question was withdrawn.

The Mayor confirmed that Mr Baldwin’s question and supplementary had been withdrawn in advance of the meeting.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 the lack of financial transparency and Medium Term Financial Planning over a number of years has masked the financial problems that RBWM were facing and that, potentially, could have been avoided.’

They also stated ‘Overall we have concerns that:

·       Members were able to circumvent RBWM’s approved policy framework to include additional schemes in the capital programme without appropriate challenge from officers;’ and

·       Schemes appeared in the Capital Programme with no business case;

My understanding of the process is that where capital expenditure does not relate to service delivery and is proposed to fund an investment with financial return, the business case relating to that proposal would be published at the time as part of the Cabinet consideration of the investment.

The asset portfolio is under review, especially in light of the current financial situation and all options for income generation are being considered.

Andrew Hill noted that Councillor Werner had previously used the phrase “fake budget”. He observed that although councillors were warned in the code of conduct not to criticise officers, he considered that there was a risk that the meeting would be a “fake meeting” without discussing how previous administrations were enabled and cited examples which he said should not happen in a best-value authority.

Andrew Hill asked whether it represented best-value to keep community centres empty, when there were community groups offering to pay rent, which would surely reduce the council’s debts and save services.

Councillor Jones responded that the Council was reviewing all of their assets and if there was a viable business case for rental to groups when compared with other options then it would be considered.

Councillor Werner, Leader of the Council replied to the points made and stated that it was councillors who make the decisions and not officers. Officers advise but councillors decide. He added that as seen within the budget Conservative councillors decided to build up large levels of debt with no real plan to pay them; decided to build a massive car park for commuters in the middle of lockdown, not knowing how work patterns would change; decided to use out of date inflation figures in their February budget and fixed the budget two months before they needed to in December giving them the wrong inflation rate and decided to include a whole list of savings targets that they knew would be impossible to achieve. He stated that Conservative councillors knew all these things as they were raised repeatedly at budget meetings but these decisions were made. He stated that it was therefore their job to fix the mess.

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

According to the South West Maidenhead SPD, the funding gap for the golf club site theoretically underpinning the medium term plan capital receipts is £47.4m. Given developers report problems with inflation, raw materials, and housing market, does RBWM now expect a much smaller return if developed, and has this loss been quantified for the MTFP?

Written response: The £47.4m you reference is the estimated required infrastructure investment above the CIL receipts expected and is expected to be funded by S106 contributions from the developments. There isn’t a direct relationship between the infrastructure funding and the council’s potential financial return as a landowner which forms part of the MTFP.

Discussions around all asset income are ongoing and while revisions of the MTFP will be updated with the latest estimates given to Finance, they will only be considered final as and when decisions are made.

Andrew Hill reported that Councillor Werner said that the golf club value projections were "inaccurate finger in the air predictions” and in February, Councillor Julian Tisi had suggested that the golf club receipts were as low as £120m. He stated that developers at Harvest Hill South had rejected the Council’s simple preferred model of s106 funding which the council says would lead to “greater uncertainty” on the funding of essential infrastructure. He continued that councillors had allowed the Property Company to transfer massive unknown cost risks from developers onto tax payers citing the Magnet deal and HS2 as examples. He concluded that The Transparency Code 2015 stated that “commercial confidentiality” was not breached by the routine publication of public contracts, and advised councils transparently to publish them all. He asked whether this would be done.

Councillor Jones responded that she had asked officers to consider the transparency code 2015 guidance and would seek to publish contracts as long as they do not break commercial confidentiality. She asked that it be noted that some contracts were negotiated over a period of time so would not be published until all negotiations were complete.