Upcoming Compton area events include Heritage Walk and Happy’s Circus. See below for details, plus regular events and group activities.

• The clawback

This also appears in This Week with Brian for 12 September but we reproduce it here as one of the schools most affected by this is The Downs in Compton.

The extraordinary Full Council meeting of West Berkshire Council on 5 September considered the opposition motion of the “Proposal for consideration by Council as detailed in the requisition submitted on the 22 July 2024, signed by the requisite number of Members: this Council calls on the Chairman of Council to write to the Schools Forum to request that they review the decision to claw back West Berkshire schools’ surplus funds to be applied to their budgets for the financial year 2024-25.” You can see the recording of the meeting here. You can read more about the background to the clawback issue here.

The motion was, unsurprisingly, defeated. The debate was remarkable for the fact that the two sides seemed to pay little attention to what the other was saying. The opposition’s points were well made, emotive and logical; the administration’s were more dispassionately focused on the over-arching problem of the special educational needs deficit and the need to do something about it.

You may have read elsewhere that the meeting was an omnishambles and that the WBC’s Leader’s admission that the ongoing review of the situation amounted to a partial climbdown. These judgments are missing the point. The whole business was, from start to finish, played out to convince Whitehall that WBC was trying to do something to resolve a funding mess which the Council had not created, but may yet be financially responsible for. The more WBC could be seen to be helping itself, the better deal it might get when the nightmare of the SEN funding costs are added to the municipal books in the next financial year.

As for the matter of how this was handled, the answer has to be not very well. Spin it how you want, any initiative which involves an explosion of rage from schools, a written statement and a verbal statement from the Leader within a couple of days, a lot of critical press coverage and a red-green-grey-blue alliance for an extraordinary council meeting cannot be regarded as having gone according to plan. Mind you, Whitehall might have noticed some of this, so, perhaps, job done.

Possibly it was haste that caused the problem. Councillor Culver at the meeting echoed the thoughts of many, including me, when she said that she’d been unable to obtain from the portfolio holder any confirmation in the regulations that the bank account in which the money was held was the determining factor in whether the money could be clawed back.

At WBC’s Scrutiny Commission on 17 July (you can watch here from about 1′ 45″), the financial portfolio holder Iain Cottingham said that PTA-raised funds should not be subject to claw-back unless they’d been moved to the school’s general account, in which case they would be. However, at the conclusion of her remarks at the 5 September meeting, Heather Codling said that the sums being clawed back “do not include any PTA or fundraised money via charitable donations, or other parent activity”.

Make your mind up. These are completely different definitions, one based on the location of funds and the other on their provenance. Accounts exist in order to differentiate the latter, even if all the money is in the same bank account. All the schools had had their finances audited by WBC a few months before the advanced clawback was announced. If there was something dreadfully wrong, why was it not highlighted then? If there was any doubt, why was the provenance of the money not established before the announcement in mid July? If the accounts were in good order (which the successful audits suggest they should have been) this should have been a simple job for each school.

“It’s good news that the clawbacks are being reviewed,” Minority Leader David Marsh told me on 12 September. “Credit to Jeff Brooks, the council leader, for taking personal charge of the issue and visiting some of the affected schools in response to objections raised by head teachers, school business managers, governing bodies, and opposition councillors.

“No one opposes the principle of clawing back funds that schools do not need to spend: but the way the council went about this, targeting money in the middle of the financial year, was completely wrong, throwing schools’ plans into disarray and placing an unacceptable burden on head teachers and school business managers.”

It’s hard to pretend that this has played out well locally. Nationally, however, all the publicity might have helped WBC’s cause. Heads might be nodding approvingly in SW1: “Here’s a council that’s toughing things out with schools and taking some action itself to solve this problem. Put them down in the green column for ‘better deal’ when we have to put the SEN costs on the balance sheets.” Whether or not WBC manages to claw back any significant funds from this rather muddled exercise is perhaps of less importance.

• Project Groundwater

Project Groundwater is working to identify, design and test measures that could:

• Increase property flood resilience to groundwater flooding
• Reduce the risk of groundwater flooding reaching properties
• Improve community resilience during groundwater flood events

The latest newsletter explains that “This will support the creation of a best practice toolkit for communities at risk of groundwater flooding. Therefore, we are releasing our Flood Experience Questionnaire in the Pang Valley and the Lambourn Valley. We will release this questionnaire in our other communities in the future, see our website for more information on when.

“This questionnaire has been developed to increase our understanding of how groundwater flooding impacts you and the existing levels of resilience within your community. The responses to this questionnaire will help shape the research and innovation to be undertaken as part of the project, with the aim of identifying and implementing measures that will help you respond to future groundwater flood events.

“This questionnaire will be used to identify properties to receive a free Property Flood Resilience Survey as part of this research.”

For more information and to take part in the questionnaire, please click here.

• The Newbury Show

Saturday 21 and Sunday 22 September are the dates for the diary for the 2024 Newbury Show. More information can be found by clicking here.

Recently updated news include arable farming in action, a driving experience, tweaks to the layout, early-bird parking advice and the 2024 Showground map.

• Have your say

Have your say on current consultations being run by West Berkshire Council:

Draft Parking Review On Street Order Amendment (REF0034IM) – deadline 13 September 2024.
West Berkshire Bus Service Survey 2024 – deadline extended to 29 September 2024.
Argyle Rd, Hampton Rd and Derby Rd, Newbury: Proposed 20mph speed limit by Traffic Regulation Order (Ref: 9529) – deadline 3 October 2024.