Councillors clash over motion calling for inquiry into cause of Royal Borough's financial woes

A lively full council debate saw members clash over how to find out more information about how the Royal Borough’s financial woes came about.

At the meeting on Wednesday night, councillor Julian Sharpe (Con, Ascot and Sunninghill) presented a motion to request an independent report be brought to full council outlining how RBWM ‘got into this financial position’.

The motion called for the report to include all the accounting errors, ‘individuals who failed’ and any governance and decision-making errors.

Cllr Sharpe told the meeting: “What we are asking for here is absolute clarity and more importantly transparency on how the council got into the situation, from a financial point of view, that it is currently in.

“This administration is currently making the council weaker and less resilient than it should be – selling off assets, it’s massively increasing council tax and other charges to residents and providing reduced services.

"This is all a shocking state of play.” While councillors supported the sentiment of delving deeper into the issue, many pointed out investigations had already been done previously and findings have been outlined in the CIPFA (Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy) report.

Councillor Mark Wilson (Lib Dem, Eton and Castle) proposed an amendment to the motion stating the council acknowledges the work the current administration has carried out to ‘resolve the financial problems caused by previous administrations’.

The amendment also requested a report be brought back to a future council meeting on the ‘failures of financial management and governance’ as detailed in the two previous CIPFA reviews and external auditor’s comments, including the ‘potential costs, benefits, scope and feasibility of a further investigation’.

He added: “Like many residents, I want the people responsible for the state of the finances inherited by this administration to be properly held to account.

“I’m frustrated there has not been sufficient accountability shown so far. It is hard to hold people to account once they are gone. The members responsible for the poor decisions were soundly rejected at the ballot box and key officers have left the council.”

Cllr Wilson added Cllr Sharpe’s original motion is ‘open-ended in scope’ and would likely ‘be lengthy, time consuming and extremely costly to residents’.

He added other embattled councils such as Croydon have embarked on investigations to hold people to account and have spent ‘very large sums of money and achieved very little’.

Council leader Simon Werner (Lib Dem, Pinkneys Green) supported the amendment and said they ‘cannot commit the council to spending an unknown amount of money with no idea whether it will achieve anything at all’.

“We need to find out those facts first, then make the decision,” he added.

Councillor Neil Knowles, leader of the independents, said he believed an inquiry should be held, but instead of ‘raking over old coal’, a summary of the evidence should be provided, and he felt that is ‘best served’ by the amendment.

Councillor Sharpe said he is ‘absolutely not after a name and shame’, but deputy council leader, Lynne Jones, hit back that her Conservative counterpart ‘definitely’ was asking for this because the motion ‘specifies individuals who actually failed’. She said:

“I ask this council not to go back down this route, it smacks of history repeating itself.”

Councillors voted in favour of the amendment, by 29 votes to seven.