Bucks Council £279m in debt despite saving £7m
Buckinghamshire Council has cut its debt by more than £7 million over the past year, bucking the national trend which has seen local authority borrowing soar.
New figures show the council’s total debt stood at £278.6m at the end of the 2024/25 financial year, down from £285.7m the year before, a 2.48 per cent fall. That equates to a reduction of around £12.50 per resident.
But despite the fall, the authority still owes almost £279m – a significant sum which will take years to repay.
By contrast, councils across the UK added £7.8bn to their collective debt pile in just 12 months, bringing the total owed to £122.2bn, equivalent to £1,791 per resident as of April 2025.
Robert Carington, Buckinghamshire Council’s Cabinet Member for Resources, said the authority has not taken on any new external borrowing since it was created in 2020.
He said: “This means our debt level has fallen by £7.1m as debt has been repaid during that time, including a repayment of borrowing from the Public Works Loans Board (PWLB)
“We pursue a strategy of keeping borrowing to a minimum while recognising that it can be an important avenue to fund important large-scale projects.
“In such cases, we would assess affordability before entering into any external borrowing arrangement and have a policy to keep external borrowing costs as low as possible.
“We will always make financial decisions with our residents’ best interests as our focus.”
Councils are allowed to borrow to invest in projects such as schools, leisure centres and theatres, or even commercial property that generates income.
But nationally, experts have raised concerns about the sharp rise in short-term lending from central government, which is sometimes being used to plug day-to-day budget gaps rather than to fund long-term investments.
Jonathan Carr-West, chief executive of the Local Government Information Unit, described spiralling levels of local authority debt as “extremely worrying”.
He said: “That is not a sustainable system. As one local government finance officer said to me, it’s essentially payday loans for local governments.
“I don’t think the government would say that’s it’s long-term ambition. They would say that is what we have had to do to paper over the cracks while we introduce a new funding system for local government.”
The BBC Shared Data Unit analysed the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities’ borrowing and investment live tables for Q4 2024–25.
Total council debt was calculated by adding all short and long-term borrowing categories, including banks, building societies, central government and the Public Works Loan Board.
Debt-per-resident figures were based on Office for National Statistics population estimates.