We have written much about our Council’s perilous financial position. Thankfully the government have agreed in-principle this afternoon to grant Exceptional Financial Support to 35 councils, including Hillingdon.
This means our Council can borrow £150m as part of an emergency bailout. It’ll cost us all with repayments in the long term, but it allows the Council to set next year’s budget (with borrowed money) without going bankrupt.
The full Council meeting at 19:30 on Thursday evening is when the Budget for 2025/26 will be agreed. It will be livestreamed, and anyone can attend the Civic Centre in person to watch.
Is it normal for a council to need a bailout?
Hillingdon Council is likely to make a big point of the fact that 34 other councils also needed this emergency bailout, but the fact remains that there are 317 councils and about 90% of councils didn’t need one. Is it normal to need a bailout when only 10% of councils needed one?
“It’s all the refugees, Heathrow, and Chagossians!”
No: it’s just not. We are likely to hear lots made of the unfair burden of refugees, the impact from Heathrow, and the cost of Chagossian arrivals over the next few days from our Council. The numbers do not support these claims.
Is it the refugees, Heathrow or Chagossians?
Refugees
We know from Freedom of Information requests in the second half of last year that support for refugees left Hillingdon short by about £5m. Does a £5m cost make up much of a £150m bailout?
Heathrow
We’ll be covering the actual impact from Heathrow in the next few weeks, following the robust and ongoing scrutiny from Cllr Kaur at the Residents’ Services Select Committee over the last six months.
Chagossians
Depending how they define what a year is, and perhaps which day it is, Hillingdon claims a cost of £2m or £2.6m for Chagossian arrivals, we can’t see a pattern yet. We’re working on it, but last month our Council triumphantly reported that they had been reimbursed by the government for the 2024/25 cost of Chagossian arrivals. Does even a £2.6m cost make up much of a £150m bailout?
There will be strings attached
We know that EFS isn’t free money: despite Cllrs Goddard and Lavery trying to use clever jargon to imply otherwise, it will cost us dearly over the next 20 years. The MHCLG will also attach conditions to the granting of Hillingdon’s EFS.
We don’t yet know what these strings will be, and after the Hillingdon leadership was chastised strongly by EY, our external auditors, this month for having buried a very critical report on their accounting and governance procedures for three months, we have little confidence that Hillingdon will choose to publish the conditions of their bailout, so we are seeking to independently obtain copies of them.
The Councils with bailouts agreed today
Our Council is always keen to compare us with metrics from other councils, nationally or across London. We have the fourth largest bailout agreed in principal across both 2025/26 and 2026/27 in England. Across the London Boroughs, we are have the second largest – behind the only posterboy for Council failure, Croydon Council.
| Local Authority | 2026-27 | 2025-26 | Total over both years |
| Croydon | £119m | £110.3m | £229.3m |
| Shropshire | £121m | £71.4m | £192.4m |
| Warrington | £92m | £87m | £179.1m |
| Hillingdon | £62m | £88m | £150m |
| Haringey | £84m | £54m | £138m |
| Thurrock | £68.9m | £62.1m | £131m |
| Bedford | £58m | £22m | £80m |
| Barnet | £79.6m | £79.6m | |
| Bradford | £78m | £78m | |
| Havering | £77m | £77m | |
| Somerset | £30m | £45.1m | £75.1m |
| East Sussex | £70m | £70m | |
| Redbridge | £70m | £70m | |
| Lambeth | £20m | £46m | £66m |
| Worcestershire | £59.9m | £59.9m | |
| Woking | £58.1m | £58.1m | |
| West Berkshire | £30m | £20m | £50m |
| Windsor and Maidenhead | £48.8m | £48.8m | |
| Slough | £42.9m | £42.9m | |
| Medway | £10.1m | £28.5m | £38.6m |
| Cheshire East | £35m | £35m | |
| Halton | £35m | £35m | |
| Swindon | £22.3m | £22.3m | |
| Waltham Forest | £19m | £19m | |
| Redcar and Cleveland | £18.5m | £18.5m | |
| Brighton and Hove | £15m | £15m | |
| Isle of Wight | £12.9m | £12.9m | |
| Trafford | £12.7m | £12.7m | |
| Sefton | £12m | £12m | |
| Cumberland | £11.8m | £11.8m | |
| Gloucester | £9.1m | £2.6m | £11.6m |
| Peterborough | £5.7m | £5m | £10.6m |
| Stoke-on-Trent | £10.5m | £10.5m | |
| Worthing | £5m | £4.8m | £9.8m |
| Wirral | £6m | £6m |
Sometimes being top of a comparison table isn’t quite the prize it sounds.
Next year’s budget – is it enough?
The Council’s own Chief Finance Officer warns that we are in a position of ‘materially weakened financial resilience‘The 2026/27 budget is built on ‘continued material risk‘ and can only be balanced with this bailout that we have now secured (in principle).
The budget for next year relies on what he calls a ‘step change’ in our Council’s performance because of a past track record of failing to deliver savings. Many of the new savings are flagged as ‘higher risk’ and ‘complex’, meaning if they don’t work exactly as planned, the Council will have to take ‘further corrective action’ mid-year. What that could mean… remains to be seen.
Last year’s budget – was it even legal?
Well, the external auditors didn’t seem to think so: at this month’s Audit Committee meeting, EY made a formal recommendation that Hillingdon Council goes back to look at its budget again, to confirm that it was legal… because EY couldn’t see how it was.
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