Wokingham Council gets a substantial uplift in money this year

I keep hearing from the Lib Dem Council that Wokingham gets little money from central government. I will use a few blogs to set out again what Wokingham Council is receiving from government. These are often areas where I have put the case for more funding to government.

The biggest sum of money the Borough never mentions is the £167,979,385 of grant to run our schools. Education represents around a half of the Council’s spending and all the main costs are covered by government grant. Why do they forget this? The current year money is up by more than 7% on the previous year.

In addition this year there is an additional £4,555,857 of Additional grant , £1,480,767 to cover extra pay rises this year for teachers and an extra £552,039 to cover additional pension contributions.

Wokingham will also receive a general pupil premium of £3,982,757. There is an extra £1,048,340 for sports.

There is a grant of £2,386,368 to cover the costs of free meals for infants. There is  £510,885 for the National Tutoring programme.  There are payments for the Coronavirus recovery programme of £816,058.  There will be additional money later this year under these last  two headings.

There is also £10,823,438 of capital money for schools. to improve and expand buildings.

It would be good to hear a bit more from the Council about how this money is being spent and some recognition of these substantial national grant sums.