Oxfordshire County Council's commercial strategy raises questions

Oxfordshire County Council's commercial strategy aims to help reduce its deficit of £13.9m

Questions have been raised about a council's plans to seek out commercial opportunities to generate revenue.

Oxfordshire County Council's new commercial strategy aims to help reduce its deficit of £13.9m from 2025.

It was agreed by the cabinet in March and discussed by the scrutiny committee earlier.

It heard concerns around the council's need to get the right balance between commercial endeavours and serving residents.

In January the council said it needed to find another £2.1m following the government's annual allocation of money to local authorities.

Presenting the report, Dan Levy, cabinet member for finance, said: "We face - as all councils do - financial challenges, and we should not pass up sensibly considered opportunities to be more commercial in what we do.

"It goes without saying that our prime function is not to be a commercial organisation, it's to be a county council and support our residents, businesses, and visitors, and this will support us to do that."

'Ambitious'

Ian Dyson, director of finance services, said the authority's focus over the first year would be training up staff and preparing its systems for the new way of thinking.

He said it would then look for "more ambitious opportunities" to maximise its assets to support "better productivity" and "better value for money".

He said a good example was how the council, which is run by a Liberal Democrats and Green Party coalition, was planning to put its ageing county hall headquarters up for sale on the international market.

But Chair Eddie Reeves, leader of the Conservative Independent Alliance, asked the panel: "Community focus could potentially jar with a commercial strategy could it not?"

He added: "Very often it isn't the case that maximising the financial revenue from a given estate is necessarily best for the community."

Liberal Democrat Callum Miller said the report showed an "aspiration towards changing culture within the organisation and driving out better value for money for all our operations".

But he said the term "commercial" conveyed a "narrow bottom-line focused approach".

Labour councillor Glynis Phillips proposed that the report was looked at again in six months' time to see if concerns around training, funding, and risk management had been addressed.

She also asked for the plans to be run by the district councils which have their own strategies around economic generation.

The committee agreed to discuss the strategy's progress in October.

Follow BBC South on Facebook, X, or Instagram. Send your story ideas to [e-mail] or via WhatsApp on 0808 100 2240.