Hillingdon Council must find another £45 million in savings by 2028/29 despite securing almost £175 million in emergency government support to avert financial collapse, with proposals including a 70% rise in parking charges and changes to care services.

The additional savings come on top of £48 million in cuts and efficiencies already planned for 2027/28. For the Conservative-run west London authority, the emergency assistance has prevented an immediate financial crisis without resolving the longer-term gap between spending and available resources.

External auditors told the council’s Audit, Finance and Performance Committee that the authority would have been “out of reserves” by the end of the previous financial year without central government intervention.

The Exceptional Financial Support package helped avert a Section 114 notice, the local government equivalent of declaring bankruptcy, and allowed around £40 million to be redirected towards rebuilding depleted reserves. The council must now demonstrate that it can balance its finances before those support arrangements expire.

Pete Carpenter, deputy Section 151 officer, warned councillors that delivering the higher savings margins was necessary to escape reliance on exceptional support. Chief executive Tony Zaman said the authority was “way past anything that's straightforward and easy” and entering “challenging territory”.

A separate pressure concerns the accounting treatment of Dedicated Schools Grant deficits. Although the Government has agreed to absorb around 90% of Hillingdon’s historic schools-related debt, worth approximately £69 million, officers estimate that the council could still face a £7.7 million to £10 million bill when current arrangements end in 2028. It plans to set aside an unused £10 million as a reserve against that liability.

Residents would encounter the savings programme through both higher charges and altered services. Alongside the proposed parking increase, the council plans to remove all dog waste bins and raise fees for garden waste collection, cemetery services and planning applications.

It also proposes reducing costly hotel placements for homeless households by acquiring more properties directly and using longer-term private rented accommodation. Other measures include renegotiating care contracts, encouraging more post-16 pupils to accept transport allowances instead of council-funded taxis, and moving some care leavers into shared accommodation.

These proposals combine attempts to reduce the cost of provision with higher charges for service users. Their full extent, and how they contribute to the required savings, should become clearer when provisional budget proposals are published in the coming weeks.