Funding cuts to Buckinghamshire community boards as local elections loom

Funding cuts to Buckinghamshire community boards have been noted in a new report ahead of the 2025 local elections.

Buckinghamshire Council has confirmed that from 2025/26 its total budget for community boards will be £1 million, which includes staffing, project funding, and operational delivery costs.

This marks a decline from the £4.9 million spent in 2020 when the unitary authority’s 16 current community boards were established.

Councillors sit on these boards to represent the voices of local people, ‘capture thoughts, ideas and suggestions’, bring together residents and other partners such as Thames Valley Police and to ‘identify local needs and work to produce creative solutions’.

The funding cuts were highlighted by councillor Stuart Wilson, the leader of Impact alliance opposition group of councillors at Bucks Council, ahead of Tuesday’s cabinet meeting.

During the meeting, cabinet members agreed that the number of community boards would be reduced from 16 to eight next year immediately following the local elections.

Each board will have a ‘dedicated community board manager’ and a total sum of £250,000 available for project funding.

The changes to community boards come as a Boundary Commission review will reduce the number of Bucks councillors at the next local elections from 147 to 97 together with some ward boundary changes.

Cllr Wilson said that ‘budgetary pressures’ were behind the ‘substantial reduction in funding’ for the boards and that this had resulted in their number being halved to eight.

During the cabinet meeting, he claimed that councillors had not been consulted on the changes to community boards. He said this was despite the council’s commitment to ‘localism being a core element of the formation of the unitary authority’.

The councillor noted what he called the ‘peculiar arrangements’ of some of the eight new boards, such as putting the ‘new ward of Flackwell Heath & The Wooburns, a series of semi-rural parished villages’ in the same board as ‘the unparished urban area of Wycombe’.

He told the meeting: “I wanted to raise a question of concern in terms of why local members weren’t consulted.”

Cllr Arif Hussain, the cabinet member for communities, responded to the claims. He told the meeting: “To be honest I am very surprised at your suggestion that elected members were not consulted around the change of these community boards.

“A discussion has been going on for quite a number of months now and we have been very open and honest with elected members, with stakeholders, as well as other parties.”