Rising to the financial challenge

THE financial pressures on the council, as for every household in the borough, are no less this year than last.

Inflation is still with us.

Demand for our services, especially in the areas of home-to-school transport and adult social care, continues to grow at an unsustainable rate. Interest rates remain high and rising.

Central government has given the council inadequate core funding, meaning we rely to a much great extent than other councils do on what resources we can generate ourselves.

All around us, councils are struggling to balance their books. Several have effectively gone bankrupt, leading the government to step in and appoint commissioners to take over, introducing deep cuts in services and raising the council tax to a much higher level than in other local authority areas.

We are determined to avoid that fate befalling Wokingham, even if it requires us to make tough devious that we would rather not make. Sound finance is the basis of a good council; without it, we can do nothing to serve you and your community.

Considerable though the challenges are this year, I have reasons for optimism about our ability to weather the storms ahead.

First, we surmounted similar challenges last year.

IHAVE now been the lead councillor for Children’s Services’ for a year.

When the Liberal Democrats took over the council in May 2022, we inherited a system which was faced with rising numbers of children with special educational needs and disabilities, but was struggling to find the capacity or the resources to provide those children with the education they needed.

Too many of our children with special educational needs and disabilities have to travel a long way out of the borough for their education.

Many of the schools they go to are in the independent sector, and very expensive.

While there will always be some children who need very specialist provision, many of the children who currently have to go further afield would benefit from being able to go to an appropriate school closer to home.

A new special school in Winnersh is already on the way.

It will take 150 children and the intention is that it will serve Wokingham Borough and Reading equally.

It is due to open in September, but it has been obvious for a while that this would not meet all the extra demand for special school places.

Last autumn, we bid to the Department for Education for funding to build two additional special schools, and earlier this year we found out that we were successful in both bids.

We are delighted.

We had hoped to get funding for one school, and were amazed to get both.

The fact that we did is an indication that the government has recognised the significant level of difficulty that we have with provision and funding locally.

The two schools will take 100 children each.

One will be for children with primarily emotional and mental health needs, and the other for children with, primarily, learning and other disabilities.

Work has now started on the building projects and we expect the schools to be open in about four to five years.

These two new schools will help, but they are not the only thing that needs to happen with regard to Special Educational Needs and Disabilities.

Due to Wokingham’s low level of education funding, since the funding mechanism changed in 2017 the schools budget has accumulated a deficit of over £16 million, almost entirely in the block of spending provided for Special Educational Needs.

If spending were to be left unchecked, the deficit would continue to spiral upwards to the point at which in about five years it would threaten the very viability of the council itself.

But also, the quality of our SEND service is not good enough.

While Wokingham Borough is far from the worst-performing local authority on SEND, we can, and should, do better for our children.

As well as more specialist provision locally, we need better support for children in mainstream schools, right from the point at which it is first identified that they may have additional needs.

Creating a better SEND support service will be a win for everyone.

By supporting children more effectively and much earlier, we will do better for the children, their parents and their schools, but we will also save money.

Making huge structural changes to the way we handle Special Educational Needs is not easy and will take a while.

It requires real partnership working with our schools, our colleagues in the NHS, and, most importantly, parents.

There are likely to be bumps along the road.

Change is never easy.

We know we are asking parents, particularly, to take a leap of faith that we can make things better for their children.

We can’t guarantee that we can do everything that they want.

But we are determined to do better.

The Lib Dems started to bring change to the council in our first year.

We will be working hard towards making even more of a difference in the year ahead.

Cllr Prue Bray is the deputy leader of the council, executive member for children’s services, and ward member for Winnersh

We not only eliminated the in-year deficit that we inherited from our predecessors, but also started the process of rebuilding the council’s general fund balance, it’s general reserve. We did that thanks to hard work by council officers and courageous decisionmaking by councillors.

Second, we are forging productive and effective relationships with external partners in the voluntary and charitable sector, faith groups, the Youth Council, town and parish councils, businesses, schools, the university, health providers, and the emergency services.

These partnerships help ensure that the people of the borough receive the help they need by pooling ideas, knowledge, data, person-power, and resources.

Gone are the days when the council sought to do everything itself; we are embracing partnership working to benefit from collaborative efforts to achieve agreed objectives.

Finally, I have great faith in the good sense and intelligence of the people of the borough. You know, from you own experiences of running households, or your own working life, that financial solvency is vital.

I have every confidence that if we share with you the challenges we face, you will appreciate that tough decisions are necessary and will resist those siren voices telling you that there’s an easy and painless way to deal with the problems.

We have seen in recent years the dangers of peddling simple solutions to complex problems.

Now is the time for a more grown-up approach, which seeks to explain the difficult choices clearly and honestly and brings you into the conversation at an early stage.