Prime Minister Rishi Sunak called the next general election on Wednesday 24 May 2024, circa 16:26 after a day filled with rumour beforehand. Am I a great fan of the current administration? No. Have I confidence in our current Member of Parliament, Theresa May? Yes, but she is standing down, and we have no idea who is to take her place as MP, because she’s be the only one Maidenhead has ever had. What competition do the Conservatives have in Maidenhead? Well, the Conservatives are in the minority, with the local council being run by a mix of Lib-Dems and Independents. And there’s a thing, because the leadership just made application to the Treasury for exceptional financial support. In short, RBWM is bankrupt, and needs bailing out by central government.

The council’s perilous position is best described by the local paper, the Maidenhead Advertiser. “The Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead council has been forced to seek ‘exceptional financial support’ from central government to rescue it from its perilous situation, ‘due in large part to historical local and national decisions’ going back many years. Year-on-year reductions to council tax for a period of six years from 2010 have left the council’s budget £30 million lower than if council tax had risen in line with average increases across the country. At the same time, the council’s debt increased from £58.7 million in 2014 to £204 million by March 2023, during the time when Government funding to local authorities was cut by 30 per cent. Reserves in April 2023 were at an un-audited £10m – the lowest known reserves of any unitary authority.“

There is much I like about local government; suffice it to say that much decision-making is located near where the choices made will have an impact. The trouble is that local government needs to avoid ‘aping’ national government, and that’s where RBWM got things really wrong over time. When George Osborne became Chancellor of the Exchequer in 2010, he called for austerity measures in a country seeking to recover from the 2008 financial crisis. Sadly, both local council leaders, Simon Dudley (2016-19) and his successor Andrew Johnston (2019-2023) chose to pursue a minimalist policy for local rates, keeping the cash costs to local residents for council services at a rock bottom rate. And guess what, if you don’t keep the cash coming in, services suffer and eventually the council can’t actually pay for the minimum services required of it by local people and national government. It’s petty to talk about the loss of our flower-baskets and local gardening services to keep the Town Hall flower beds under control, not so trivial when local police and warden services disappear and frankly a disgrace when the audit controls discover a black hole into which previous years of un-budgeted expenses have been filed.

By way of example, here’s Cllr Dudley writing a year ago in ‘Conservative Home’ about the unrecognised successes of his period leading RBWM, prior to their dismissal by the electorate:

“I was a councillor here from 2007 to 2019 (Deputy Leader, Lead Member for Finance in a great team). I was Leader from 2016 to 2019. We held the council in the hard times of the Brexit stalemate of May 2019. Direct comparisons with prior elections (we won four times) are hard because we instigated a boundary review and reduced the number of councillors from 53 to 41 prior to the 2019 “all out” elections. However, in May 2019 we achieved 43 per cent of the vote and 35,999 votes for a Conservative candidate. We held the council by 22 to 19. We did this with a hugely pro-housing agenda. Developing Maidenhead Golf Club (worth around £300 million to the local taxpayer) with a proposed 1,800 new homes (30 per cent of which will be affordable) as part of a Borough Local Plan which was restarted when I became Leader and is now adopted. It would have been hard for us to be seen as less pro-housing, establishing two housebuilding joint ventures, one with Cala Homes (for the golf club) and another with Countryside for regenerating Maidenhead.”

The reality some 12 months on are really clear to those councillors and public officials left to clear up the mess left by the Conservatives, an oxymoron if ever there was one for the behaviour of those previous politicians (now out of office). As things turn out at the Golf Club, it looks as though the council won’t benefit from the £300 million windfall any more than it did the sale of the old leisure centre to Countrywide for the price of being provided with a new one – the new Braywick Leisure centre cost some £40 million and the old site was devalued from £38 million to… £15 million and still shrinking. The Golf club sale suffers from the similar failure to ‘conserve’ the deal struck. It may be that the golf course land was worth north of £300 million pounds back when the deal was struck (or not, as the reality seems to be). I am told that the arrangements with Cala Homes permits them to claw back from that price all the additional elements that make for building a modern set of homes, schools, doctors and attendant facilities, including pumps for all, bio-net-gain, etc.

I feel sure by now, dear reader, you’ll wonder why I have entitled this blog as ‘Out of the frying pan…’, and that’s actually because the focus on redeveloping Maidenhead’s town centre and enabling it’s repopulation with residents living ‘in town’ has had a fabulous effect on the local economy, Not only do we have a cherished new Waterside development in the town, but we have become a major attraction across the global corporate world for being a town worth investing in, what with the Elizabeth line, and as Agents Knight Frank wrote last month (22 May) “A key strength of Maidenhead as an office location is its connectivity to its surrounding areas. The transport infrastructure means that London can be reached in as little as 17 minutes via train and is easily accessible via the M4 motorway. Access to a diverse workforce is vital for occupiers and reaching key UK centres within a reasonable journey time. Lifestyle and wellbeing are another of Maidenhead’s strengths. The Chapel Arches, One Maidenhead and Tempo developments have provided the town centre with abundant usable space, including housing, retail, public spaces, food and beverage, and offices. This is key for occupiers, who need to attract and retain talent. Onward, the Nicholson Quarter regeneration will be key in continuing the momentum by providing the space for employers and employees to remain and relocate.“

So, in short, there have been some major losses locally over the years, lots of change, much to look forward to and a sense that actually we’ve a lot now going in our favour. The pollsters are having a field day, and the changes seen locally last year in the democratic landscape look as though they are to happen across the country too. And it’s not all one way, because Scotland, Nothern Ireland and Wales are also facing seismic change, led as they have been by parties of different hues too. But, it does look as though the mead party next Friday in the Palace of Westminster/House of Commons will be Labour, so here perhaps is the ‘frying pan’.., to watch out for.

What I fear most from an incoming government under the Labour Party of course is the suggested implementation of a 20% VAT hike on private school tuition fees. With close to a thousand children in my school, the direct impact of such a hike on parents being able to afford us will be considerable. We are a business established for the purpose of offering independent schooling for children aged 2 to 18, we receive no benefits as conferred by charitable status, we pay business rates on our properties and corporation tax on our profit. Those schools that are charities in England are clearly fearful because already taking place in Scotland (2022) has been the removal of rate relief.

Our parents already pay for education through the taxes they pay, and for many families, we provide only part of the mix they need, where their local state schools can’t offer the benefits we do. What’s so very evident too is that no party of government can translate their promises into the direct action they publish in their manifesto; finding more teachers and doctors in principle sounds easy, but directing them to work in harsh, unmanageable conditions is quite something else.

School Proprietors remain politically neutral because the education service we offer must provide access to a balanced range of opinions and serve the needs not just of the present, but also ensure we reflect suitably on the past (that covers everything pretty much) and look to the future (almost certainly for most of us, the ‘unknown’). I know that schools are seen as places for fostering critical thinking and exposure to a variety of viewpoints. Such political neutrality helps ensure the curriculum focuses on facts and different perspectives, rather than promoting a specific party line. Moreover, children and young people come from families with diverse political views. Our neutral environment avoids alienating students or creating a sense of pressure to conform to a particular ideology. Parents entrust us with the education of their children. Political neutrality helps ensure that the school’s focus is on academic development, not indoctrination!

It’s important to note that neutrality doesn’t mean shying away from discussing current events or politics altogether. Our school playgrounds and events can still hold conversations about government, elections, and different political philosophies. Having studied 3 years of Ecology at University, I know how important the environment is, and I also know just how committed some young people have become to resisting climate change. However, my focus as a school academic leader should be on critical analysis and fostering independent thinking, not promoting a specific viewpoint. I’m watching as much of the political discourse in open debates on the TV as time and report reading permits, and I have been more stuck than ever that no-body from any party actually seems to answer the questions posed by the audience.

There is an old quip, attributed to George Bernard Shaw, that if all the economists were laid end to end, they’d never reach a conclusion. Actually, most economists do think alike as do the neutral public figures I’ve seen on TV and heard on radio – they are asking for the same things, including at the core the rebuilding of trust in our politicians and that they will do the right thing – please read last week’s blog because that’s absolutely the point. Whoever wins next week needs to unite the country, not divide us, bring a common purpose to the fore and, if change is to be wrought, take care and consider the unintended consequences of manifesto promises that actually won’t deliver the benefits suggested!