Wokingham Borough Council has long received the lowest level of revenue support from central government of any English council offering the same range of services.
In the summer, the government began a consultation on proposals that, if carried through, would make our financial pressures much greater. Ministers propose to take some £50 million of support away from Wokingham over the next three years. This year, we received approximately £21 million of core revenue funding from government; by 2028-29 that is expected to fall to £4.5 million.
We are trying to persuade ministers to moderate their proposed redistribution of support, as the calculations they are using are flawed and they underestimate the impact on councils like Wokingham that will have funding withdrawn.
I hope, of course, that our campaign is successful. I’m enormously grateful to our community partners and to the wider Wokingham public for rallying to support us. We will continue to put the case for moderation of the government’s proposals right up to the point in December when we expect ministers to announce their decision.
But even if we succeed in persuading the government to reduce the negative impact on Wokingham, there will still be a negative impact. We must plan for how we will deal with it.
We will approach the challenge – daunting though it is – calmly and logically. It makes no sense to rush into panic-stricken cuts that will end up costing the council more money in the long run. We are fortunate that we have significant reserves, earmarked to cover just such an eventuality, and we will release part of them to help us have the time to make measured and rational decisions in the first year of the government funding reductions.
Looking beyond that, we will need to accentuate the work we have already done to save money – some £28 million over the last three years. We will be focusing our limited resources on helping those who most need help, especially disabled children and adults and the frail elderly.
We will continue to invest in measures that will control future costs – prevention and early intervention save the council-tax payer money in the long run, so it would be foolish to cut spending in these areas.
We will also be intensifying our efforts to work alongside our community partners. Over the last three years, we have forged new relationships and built on existing ones with the voluntary and charitable sector, other councils, business, the police and other emergency services, the NHS, the Youth Council, and the University of Reading.
By working together, we can achieve much more for Wokingham than by working on our own. The pooling of knowledge, experience, and resources – human, material, and financial – extends our reach and means we can collectively better serve our community. There will need to be an even greater focus on partnership working in the future.
With the borough council budgets under strain and with the prospect of a significant cut in our government funding, it might be tempting to look inwards. But we take the view that the antidote to tough times is not introspection and retreat but looking outwards and embracing all the opportunities that partnership can bring.
By Cllr Stephen Conway
