Who Is Wasting Your Money in Barnet?
Your council tax goes up every year, but where does the money actually go?
Residents of Finchley Church End are facing a cost-of-living crisis. Energy bills are high, food prices have risen, and mortgages are still punishing. And yet, the London Borough of Barnet keeps putting its hand deeper into your pocket, raising council tax year after year, while openly admitting it cannot live within its own budget.
The numbers should alarm every resident in this ward. In 2023/24, Barnet Council overspent its budget by £22.18 million. Not a small rounding error, over twenty-two million pounds. The following year, 2024/25, a projected overspend of £25 million emerged. For 2025/26, the council needed to find £74.2 million just to balance its books, with a projected gap of over £124 million stretching to 2030.
£74.2 million budget gap in 2025/26 alone.
Council reserves fell below their own £40 million policy threshold.
Council tax hiked by 4.98% in 2025/26, on top of a 5.8% rise the year before.
Rising Bills, Falling Standards
While residents tighten their belts, Barnet Council is proposing to charge residents in higher-banded properties triple their previous council tax support, reducing discounts so that someone previously paying £50 per month now faces a bill of £150, an immediate trebling of their liability. This is not efficient. This is the shifting of a financial crisis created by council mismanagement directly onto ordinary families.
The council’s own reserves tell the story. Starting at £73.8 million in 2021, un-ringfenced reserves fell to just £39.9 million by 2024, dropping below the council’s own stated safety threshold of £40 million. External auditors flagged this as a serious risk.
Outsourcing: A Decade of Squandered Opportunity
In 2013, the then-Conservative administration struck a £322 million, ten-year outsourcing deal with Capita, handing over IT, HR, finance, customer services, highways, planning and more. The idea was that a private company could run these services more cheaply. It did not work out that way. Performance issues were documented in official reviews. Fragmentation grew: by the time Labour took over in 2022, Barnet’s IT systems already had £3.5 million of applications sitting outside the Capita contract, creating duplication, waste, and inefficiency.
It took years of campaigning, union pressure and a change of administration to undo this costly experiment. Bringing services back in-house now requires additional transition costs on top of the damages already done. The bill for this political experiment is still being paid, by you.
What I will do
The residents of Finchley Church End deserve a councillor who demands rigorous financial accountability from day one. I believe in zero-tolerance for budget overruns, transparent spending, and keeping council tax rises in line with what residents can genuinely afford. Every pound of your money must be justified, not lost in management failures and bad contracts.
Your money. Your ward. Your right to answers.
