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The Council’s ability to meet basic deadlines seems in danger of collapsing. By law, councils must publish their draft accounts by 30th June. Hillingdon failed to do so until 22nd September, making it the last borough in London to publish.
The lateness was blamed on the Oracle accounting system being “a bit of a car crash” (as described by the Chief Finance Officer at an Audit Committee meeting) but it has extended through the year, despite Oracle supposedly now being much improved. The result is severe: the Council has had ‘disclaimed’ accounts for successive years. In plain English, this means the auditors effectively refuse to sign them off because the Council has no idea whether its own balance sheet is accurate.
This is not a series of one-off errors; it is a persistent culture that exists despite intervention from the very top. When we formally challenged the Council’s leadership on why the Budget Monitoring report was missing from the November Cabinet agenda by writing to the Cabinet Member for Finance, the Chief Financial Officer (CFO), the Chief Executive Office (CEO), and the Monitoring Officer, we got no response whatsoever from the CFO and CEO. We heard, the following week, from the Monitoring Officer – where he told us us that the Chief Executive had specifically “instructed” staff to keep such incidents to a minimum “in the spirit of good governance.”
The timeline since that instruction proves that the Council’s administrative machinery is either unable or unwilling to follow the CEO’s orders:
- November Failing:
The vital “Month 6 Budget Monitoring Report” (showing a £30m overspend) was missing from the Cabinet agenda for three days after it was supposed to be published. When we asked why, Cllr Goddard claimed he only received the draft the day before publication, yet Pete Carpenter (Director of Statutory Accounts) had told us days earlier that Cabinet members receive these figures a week in advance, and senior management a week before even that.
- December Failing:
The 2026 Budget itself was published over a week late: not being finalised until the afternoon of 23rd December for a meeting that same evening. Cllr Lavery conceded hours before Christmas Eve that no one would have had time to read the 188-page document – yet the Cabinet voted unanimously to approve it anyway, hours later… except for the Leader of the Council, Cllr Edwards, who instead had sent his apologies and did not attend arguably one of the most important meetings of the year.
- February Failing:
Just today (2nd February), as we prepared these articles for publication, the agenda for next week’s Audit Committee was published, and Item 5—the 2024/25 Statement of Accounts – is once again listed as “TO FOLLOW.” Even for the meeting specifically designed to discuss and scrutinize such documents, the Council cannot produce them on time. We are seeing a ‘live’ breakdown of basic administrative functions in real-time.
Did the haste lead to errors?
The draft budget initially proposed charging residents for parking at Ruislip Lido – a proposal Cllr Lavery immediately retracted on Facebook as “incorrect” following a public backlash. Was our report incorrect, or his Budget? He confirmed that it was his Budget.
However, despite removing the charge, the budget line for £1.2m in increased parking income does not seem to be amended to reflect the loss of that revenue. Is it possible to remove a planned charge but keep the revenue target? The numbers simply do not add up.
Furthermore, the Budget’s reference to Temporary Accommodation remains incomplete. The Chief Financial Officer told each of the four Select Committees that they still need to work on that – meaning we are entering the final stages of the budget process with “unsafe” or missing figures for one of the largest areas of spending the council faces.
What of the Council’s attitude toward residents who ask for transparency? When we challenged all four of the senior officials and elected members about the late publication of the November Budget Monitoring report, the Monitoring Officer said that if a resident feels a decision is flawed due to lack of information, they have the “right to judicially review that decision.”
The Council knows it is missing deadlines, knows the CEO has ordered it to stop, but tells residents that if they don’t like it, they should hire a lawyer and sue them in the High Court. The Friends of the RAGC fundraised for exactly that, on their AVC application. For a council asking for a £150m bailout because it has, as Cllr Tuckwell put it so succinctly, “basically run out of money”… it is fortunate that residents can’t afford to spend thousands on legal fees just to see a public report – because it is not in much of a better position to find the money to defend itself.
Read more of our February 2026 series
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