The CCLA/Room151 Impact Awards spotlight finance teams with a direct impact on their local communities and the environment. This week we explore Cheltenham Borough Council’s efforts to build a technology hub while finance staff at London Borough of Hackney were key to rebuilding after a major cyber attack. Submissions for the awards can be made here. Categories here.
Paul Jones: Golden Valley Development underpins ambition to be technology superpower.
Cheltenham’s Golden Valley Development, Home of Cyber Central UK, is truly unique and is quite simply, one of the UK’s most exciting, innovative and forward-looking infrastructure projects.
This is an iconic mixed-use development encompassing high quality homes, commercial floorspace and green open spaces, all supported by sustainable transport infrastructure and focused around a world-class cyber and digital innovation zone just a stone’s throw from GCHQ’s famous “doughnut” headquarters.
The vision for this development is shared by a powerful collaborative effort, spearheaded by Cheltenham Borough Council working with a diverse range of stakeholders including GCHQ, Cynam, the Department for International Trade, Homes England and many others.
The development not only creates diverse employment, meets housing needs and improves sustainable transport in Cheltenham and Gloucestershire, but Cyber Central underpins the UK’s ambitions to become a global science and technology superpower.
Placemaking lies at the heart of the Golden Valley Development, which has already been awarded prestigious Garden Community status by Homes England. The housing minister described the project’s vision of an integrated, iconic development based around the booming cyber sector as “compelling”, with scope to deliver a true “smart” garden community with cyber security and innovation built from the ground-up.
Cheltenham has the UK’s largest concentration of cyber-tech business outside London with 11 times the national average. This is a sector that has doubled in value over the last two years with a value of £9bn.
Cheltenham Borough Council has invested £37.5m in purchasing strategically important land to enable accelerated delivery; it has also committed £180m to support the construction of high quality zero carbon homes.
This is an important development for Gloucestershire’s economic recovery post-covid, and its success is assured thanks to a collaborative approach to delivery, where leaders across business, academia, government and grassroots community groups have been engaged and harnessed to support the project.
Key milestones:
- 2015 George Osborne announced Cyber Innovation Centre would be based in Cheltenham;
- 2017 Joint Core Strategy adopted 200 hectares as allocated & safeguarded land;
- 2017 £22m transport infrastructure from GD3 HMG / Gfirst LEP awarded;
- June 2019 awarded Garden Community status for Cyber Central;
- August 2019 Cheltenham Borough Council acquires 45-hectare site for £37.5m;
- October 2019 Cheltenham Borough Council commits £180m for supporting delivery of up to 3,700 homes;
- February 2020 transport infrastructure works begin;
- March 2020 £249m Housing Infrastructure Fund investment for M5 J10 awarded;
- April 2020 launch for a Development & Investment Partner;
- April 2021 Partnership Live;
- May 2021 Planning submitted for Cluster 1 and Cluster 2;
- January 2022 site mobilisation;
- 2023 Cluster 1 and Cluster 2 operational;
- 2024 onwards Cyber Central becomes a Global leader.
The principles of the latest settlement allows authorities to spend locally what is raised locally, which is why we are so focussed on keeping our investment within our own Borough. With the concept of delivering 2m sq ft of commercial floorspace, 3,700 new homes and c.12,000 new jobs, the additional taxbase from council tax and business rates alone will cover our investment and provide a sustainable income streams for many years to come. Coupled with planning, building control, licensing and car parking fees, the finances of this project have been tested but equally passes the test that we have a key role in facilitating the long term regeneration and economic growth of our local area.
The financing of this project has been split across the general fund and housing revenue account. Taking advantage of low interest rates, a conscious decision was made to finance through short-term borrowing at a holding cost of less than £100k per annum, using the benefits achieved through business rates retention and pooling. All of our strategies and policies align behind legislation and guidance but are tested to ensure our ambitions can be achieved.
To this effect we have revised our minimum revenue provision policy and adopted a flexible use of capital receipts strategy to ensure the project is sustainable and affordable.
When assessing the risks we determined that the risk of not doing this was far greater than the risk of proceeding given our ambition for place, carbon reduction and utopia.
Paul Jones is executive director finance and assets, Cheltenham Borough Council.
Ian Williams: Finance helped recovery from ‘grave’ cyber attack
Responding to the coronavirus pandemic continues to be the greatest challenge that local council’s, our residents and local businesses have faced in a generation and of course, our greatest challenge is faced against the backdrop of over 10 years of austerity.
For many, a significant impact of this crisis has been financial, and for council’s it is no different. In Hackney these pressures have been increased still further by organised criminals who targeted us last October with a cyberattack affecting core business systems operating on legacy technologies hosted in its private data centre. Our finance team has been instrumental in the council’s recovery from that attack.
This severely affected a wide range of the council’s services, including payments, benefits and social services. With elections pending, the stamp duty holiday, annual accounts needing to be closed, council tax and business rate bills needing to be printed and the pressures of the Covid-19 pandemic, the council had huge pressure to recover data and applications rapidly.
Finance teams working with colleagues in our ICT team and services across the council through genuine hard work, initiative and dedication helped mitigate the impact helping the council avoid any damaging knee jerk or short-term decisions.
This attack was a grave event in the organisation’s history that brought hardship. The recovery is in progress. Some services are still impacted but, alongside the work undertaken to respond to the pandemic, the response has reinforced the idea that our finance teams up and down the country play a vital role and are integral to the operation of local councils. They have a positive impact on local communities, especially for some of our most vulnerable residents.
As the roll out of the vaccine continues successfully at pace our attention now quite rightly pivots towards rebuilding our communities and addressing how its impact has been disproportionate and inequalities have widened.
As they have been throughout this crisis and the austerity of the last decade, finance teams will be right at the heart of shaping policy and supporting delivery and implementation with maximum impact.
Ian Williams is group director, finance & corporate resources, London Borough of Hackney.
Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash
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AWARDS INFORMATION
Read about the awards here.
Read about the seven categories here.
For submissions click here.
To read case studies of finance team impact, click here.
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