Wycombe committee releases £450k from reserves as it struggles to spend the cash

A pot of £450,000 is set to be spent on High Wycombe under a one-off budget set by councillors.

The spending was approved this week during a meeting of Buckinghamshire Council’s High Wycombe Town Committee and has been broken down into different categories.

They include improvements and maintenance of public spaces, communication, community assets, a ‘town warden’ and grants to the community and outside bodies.

Proposals were based on some 50 suggestions that were put forward for spending the committee’s huge reserves and will be developed further in due course.

Despite the committee voting through the spending, it still needs to be approved by the council’s cabinet because the committee is only an advisory body and does not have decision making powers itself.

The committee’s inability to independently enact proposals has been criticised by campaigners who say Wycombe should have its own town council.

A bid to establish a town council to represent the currently ‘unparished’ area of Wycombe was rejected by Bucks Council last year.

During this week’s town committee meeting, Labour Councillor Karen Bates claimed the committee had ‘not been allowed or enabled’ to do the things it wants to for Wycombe over the last few years.

She said: “At last, we are in a position to do that, and we don’t have to tax our residents any more than we ought to.

“I think it is an opportunity to say we are going to get on with the job with the money that we have already got.”

The councillor referred to the committee’s decision to agree a decrease of £0.55 for Band D tax to £17.99, which it also approved during the meeting.

The tax, known as the ‘precept’, is levied on Wycombe’s residents to raise income for the committee.

Its proposed precept will raise £438,914 and cover 91 per cent of the net budgeted expenditure for 2025/26, once approved by cabinet.

Cllr Bates said: “I don’t see how we can justify putting the precept up when we have still got something like £436,000 in the bank, which is nearly three times the recommended reserve that we should keep.

“There is no need to have any more money when we still have that much reserve. Even some of that reserve could be spent.”

Conservative Councillor Sarfaraz Khan Raja told the meeting he agreed with the points made by Cllr Bates.

He said: “I think wholeheartedly it is the right way of doing it, reducing the precept and I can only wish we can do it every year in from now on.”

During the meeting, Wycombe Independent Cllr Julia Wassell criticised the fact that the committee’s huge reserves – forecast to be £877,000 by March 2025 – had been allowed to grow so much.

She said: “I don’t think there is enough reflective practice by councillors in looking at how we got to the underspend in the first place. It doesn’t show very competent management that we allowed that to happen.”

The councillor added: “I don’t agree that the money wasn’t needed. It was desperately needed to clean the pavements, to get the chewing gum off the lampposts, to get the town toilets open.”