This year I have focused on the capital budget for West Berkshire Council (WBC)

With interest rates high, any borrowing to buy and build things has a long-term effect on the revenue budget.

I believe I found 3.5 million that could be saved now or at least delayed until the council is in a better financial state.

My day job is IT Services, so when I see the council wanting to spend money on things like replacing all devices in one go, I get nervous. It’s usually better to negotiate a contract that allows the buying of quantity over time at a pre-agreed price. i.e. replace when it breaks not replace for the sake of it. That is a £168K approx. saving.

Next, when I see the council replacing server infrastructure, I see an organisation living in the IT world of pre-cloud. Every time I have looked at this for my customers, when the total cost of ownership is considered, then public, private or a hybrid of the two comes out cheaper. WBC wants to do things like replace an air con unit to keep servers cool. That’s £100K. They want to replace a Storage Address Network device, another £150K. Also replace a DB server, £75K. We are already at £325K and all this can be done easily and at a lower cost in the cloud. The above does not even consider the energy, staff, maintenance or space costs associated with having this in-house.

Next, I saw £280K per annum for 2 years to get full fibre to schools. So a £560K cost. But hang on, WBC, under the conservatives, announced they had finished full fibre across West Berkshire ages ago. There are 92 schools, so the proposal is to spend £46K per school. My suggestion will be to go to something like Starlink instead. It works everywhere, already delivers 100’s Mbps and costs around £449. i.e. 1/10^th of the proposed per school costs. That saves £514K over 2 years.

Finally, I looked at the line item about building extra storage for records across Berkshire. A legal hangover from when Berkshire County Council existed. That is £2.5Million to build plus some extra revenue costs to maintain where it's stored. Then I hear about how well the programme to have staff work from home has gone, and how the Market Street offices of WBC are now underutilised. Combined with that is speculation about building new offices somewhere in the London Road Industrial estate.

Well, if we have spare room, why are we building more storage elsewhere? Store the records at existing offices that have space and save the 2.5 million.

If we use spare office capacity, then this also benefits the other parts of the old Berkshire County Council including Reading. So other authorities also save money!

Adrian Abbs

Independent West Berkshire Councillor

Independent candidate for Reading West & Mid Berkshire constituency.