This is an extract from the Slough Observer – RBWM paid ‘gravy train’ firm £500,000 for Maidenhead Golf Course deal By Nick Clark – Local Democracy Reporter
Windsor and Maidenhead council paid its ‘gravy train’ private property firm £500,000 to manage its controversial deal to sell Maidenhead Golf Course for housing, the Observer can reveal.
The Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead’s wholly-owned private firm RBWM PropCo played a role in in major regeneration projects agreed between the council and developers since 2016.
But the council brought it in house – effectively shutting it down – in April this year, with council leader Simon Werner branding it ‘basically a mechanism for putting property developers at the heart of the decisions rather than putting the residents first’.
Councillor Gurch Singh labelled it a ‘gravy train’ that had ‘ended up milking the borough and the land’.
Now a freedom of information request by the Observer has revealed that the council paid the firm half a million pounds for its role in a deal to sell Maidenhead Golf Course to property developer Cala Homes.
The council agreed the deal in 2018 under previous council leaders, despite a campaign by residents to stop the development.
It then built up debts of £200 million to fund spending that it hoped it would be able to repay with the money it would make from the sale.
However the council now says it only expects to receive some £105 million by July 2037 based on the predicted value of the homes that will be built.
The council has now confirmed to the Observer it paid RBWM PropCo £500,000 in relation to the development.
The Observer’s freedom of information request revealed that £200,000 of this was wrongly charged to the council’s capital budget in 2020-21, rather than recorded as day-to-day revenue spending.
Councils can only use money from their capital budgets to pay for long-term assets such as buildings, major equipment and infrastructure.
But years of historic errors recently uncovered at the council discovered some £15 million was wrongly recorded as capital spending when it should have come out of its day to day budget.
Correcting the error contributed to a huge black hole in the council’s finances.
A council spokesperson said: “The council made a payment of £500,000 to the Property Company in 2020/21, relating to the management of Maidenhead Golf Course development.
“Following a more recent review of historic charges, as part of closing the 2023/24 accounts, it was estimated that only £200,000 of this payment related to the capital costs of bringing the land into use – with the remainder funding day to day operational costs, so would need to be logged as revenue.”
Council leaders voted to bring PropCo in house earlier this year after an independent review by the Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy (CIPFA).
The review found that PropCo employed an ‘expensive management team’ and that its set-up left the council with ‘limited control’ over its assets.
It said: “The company has effectively performed construction project management services aligned to a professional consultancy model, utilising the management fees from the development budgets to fund operations.”
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