Archive | Issues

The council’s £31.6 million deficit is not a mystery, nor is it explained by the public reasons related to asylum seekers and/or Chagossian arrivals, National Insurance hikes or decisions the Labour government has made recently. It is the result of different individual reasons, but three specific internal failures were all long predicted or known about: A £17.8 […]

The council’s most-used public explanation for the financial crisis is a multi-million-pound cost for supporting asylum seekers and Chagossian arrivals, which it claims the government should be funding.  The council has cited a cost of £16m for asylum seekers and of £2m for Chagossians.  Even if those figures are genuine and don’t get reimbursed, the […]

Hillingdon Council’s financial crisis has not happened overnight. It has unfolded through a sequence of predictable steps, starting with the drawing down of significant sums from reserves – which last December’s Cabinet report described as being in “steady decline over the last four years” and “too low for a borough of our size and complexity” to cover […]

This series of articles has been written by residents, for residents, and while the subjects covered are both nuanced and complex, we have aimed to keep the language simple and the explanations easy to understand. There are necessarily some terms that simply have to be used, so to assist the reader in following them, we […]

Hillingdon Council is facing a severe financial crisis. Its latest financial report forecasts the 2025/26 budget to be £31.6 million overspent as of the end of August.. (Note: The council’s headline figure is £30.2m, but £31.6m is the figure required to make its own sums add up). This overspend will wipe out the council’s entire General Fund reserve, which […]