We are not immune to these pressures

Since the sad death of Her Majesty The Queen, our thoughts have been with the Royal family and our concern has been to ensure her passing has been appropriately mourned.

But we must now turn our attention to the vast, potentially overwhelming, crisis that is looming across the country as people struggle to make ends meet in the face of a failing economy that has allowed the basic essentials of life to become unaffordable to so many people.

We are a generally affluent borough but we are not immune to the extraordinary pressure caused by these national economic failures. The number of local people needing the council’s emergency help and the help of the voluntary sector we support is too high, and is increasing all the time.

At the same time that more residents need more help, our own finances are being hit by the same problems everybody else is facing; the out-of-control increases in energy and other costs are hitting us hard and are obviously making it more expensive to run services.

We cannot increase Council

Tax much (and would not want to add more burden to our residents anyway) and Covid has hit our income through changes such as fewer people using car parks and leisure centres.

This national economic failure comes after many years of us being among the lowest-funded councils in the country and after some unfunded local spending commitments in recent times. These issues have combined to leave us in a very difficult position that will require grown-up decision making.

Wokingham Borough Council cannot fix the economy – that’s the Government’s job – but there are things we can do and things residents can do to make sure our limited funds are used to protect the most vulnerable people.

We can only help those in need through sound financial management and so are constantly looking at expenditure to make sure it is targeted only where needed.

In the months ahead we will be working to generate more income (in areas such as car parking to make up for the losses caused by Covid-19) and looking hard at services that we spend more than we should on, in particular those that do not help the most vulnerable people.

Some of these decisions will be tough ones, but we will stay true to our principle of maintaining sound finances and protecting those most in need, so that we can provide some local shelter from the storm brought down by the appalling national cost of living crisis.

Cllr Clive Jones, leader of Wokingham Borough Council