Eight years ago, in the early days of austerity, when there was hope it might be a temporary phenomenon, Warrington BC launched a mortgage scheme.
The scheme, launched in 2011/12, reduced the average age of first-time buyers by three years and helped 200 people.
Deputy chief executive of the council, Lynton Green, believes Warrington’s scheme led to the Government’s own version, Help to Buy.
Ideas like this came from the administration’s determination not to pass cuts onto residents, and councillors demonstrated a significant amount of trust in the experience, abilities and decision-making of their respected senior officer cohort.
Straight-talking leader, Cllr Russ Bowden, who previously held the finance portfolio, recalls: ‘No idea was ever off the table. Nothing was daft. We wanted to give officers the freedom to look at what was out there.’
In response to Government funding reducing by £137m, the council applied a commercial focus based on acquisitions and an ambitious investment strategy – mostly funded by external borrowing.
Asked if the council would have taken the same commercial decisions without austerity, Cllr Bowden says: ‘I think austerity gave us the imperative. If you were properly and fully funded, you’d say there’d be no need. I think we probably still would be commercial but not on the current scale.
Mr Green adds: ‘Even if there wasn’t the austerity issue trying to get people to act more commercially is important. People are willing to try out ideas, which means we’ve become more creative as an organisation as a whole.’
In 2019/20 the council’s medium-term financial plan forecasts that income of £20.5m will be received as a result of its commercial efforts.
‘You don’t want the council buying everything in town but without that income we’d be snookered,’ Cllr Bowden adds.
Operational director of economic growth, Steve Park, says: ‘I do think it’s nurturing a new breed of local government officer that does have some commercial acumen as part of their skillset that you certainly wouldn’t have if it wasn’t for austerity.
‘I do think there is a cohort of local authority officers that relish the challenge that austerity brings. Far from putting their heads in their hands, they’re optimistic. If you’d come here maybe eight years ago you wouldn’t have seen that.’
Mr Park insists that the council’s commercial approach has not led to it putting off difficult decisions and points out that the source of funding is never brought up by residents.
However, in the wake of a Local Government Association (LGA) corporate peer challenge earlier this year highlighting the risks around commercialisation, the council is now thinking carefully about its future approach.
Austerity makes it tempting to keep finding more and more income generating opportunities but Cllr Bowden – also conscious about the potential impact of Brexit – wants to get the balance right.
He continues: ‘You can’t just keep going out and buying stuff. We’ve always seen it as buying us some time to undergo some serious service transformation. I believe in telling people the truth and the reality of where we are as a council.’
The LGA peer review called for ‘tough political decisions’ and said it was now ‘imperative’ for the council to commit to a programme of savings and service transformation.
But Mr Green is adamant that people who think the council is taking lots of risk ‘don’t quite understand what we’re doing’.
He adds: ‘I think across the sector there is always a worry that someone will do something wrong, but I think maybe the sector has grown up since [the swaps affair in] Hammersmith and Fulham.
‘From the outside it looks like everything we’ve ever thought of we’ve gone ahead and done, but we’ve also been prepared to walk away from stuff.’
Mr Park admits to being conscious that the council is not a global wealth management company as he stresses the authority turns down three out of every four deals put its way.
‘Our investments have been focused here in Warrington and the wider sub-region, which other councils haven’t done,’ Cllr Bowden points out.
‘I always think, would I consider making that investment if it was my own money?’
Investments have included the £211m acquisition of a 123-acre business park in Warrington, £275m of loan facilities with 10 housing associations and the somewhat controversial £30m purchase of a 33% share in Redwood Bank, which has handed out £100m loans to small to medium enterprises since it started to improve access to finance two years ago.
The council has invested heavily in the prime-location business park since buying it and Cllr Bowden says there are 165 business on site employing thousands of people, occupancy is at 96% and it is generating £5m surplus a year.
Such investments help the council to deal with rising demand but only go so far.
Mr Park explains: ‘From a budgetary forecasting perspective, demand isn’t controllable. A saving can be wiped out by just one child case that we had no foresight of, no control of, that we didn’t see coming – and who knows where the next one comes.’
Despite these challenges, Cllr Bowden believes the proud traditional manufacturing town of Warrington – now with a population of 210,000 – ‘consistently punches above its weight’ relative to the nearby giants of Liverpool and Manchester.
A town centre redevelopment is underway, with the £140m Times Square development featuring a new market, cinema, restaurants and new council offices, into which 800 staff will move into.
The development was funded by a £150m bond – the first council bond in decades, which secured rates cheaper than the Public Works Loan Board at the time.
Doing things differently is certainly the Warrington way.
