Covid has not proved to be the financial disaster for Maidstone Borough Council that it was expecting. In fact the council has come through the last year rather well.

When the first lockdown was imposed in March last year, the council feared it would prove to be a grave financial crisis as well as a health one.

It anticipated a loss of revenue as parking fees dried up and people stopped using other facilities like the Maidstone Leisure Centre. At the same, it knew it would face rising costs as measures such as social distancing had to be introduced.

The council reacted by cutting back on its services such as expenditure on Maidstone Museum for example, and succeeded in saving £2.73m.

The accounts for the financial year April 1, 2020 to March 31, 2021, have only just become available.

They show the council actually achieved an under-spend on its "revenue" budget of £1.22m - almost 6% of the total budget of £21,287m.

The council's finance director Mark Green explained: "We did face significant financial pressures - our costs increased by £1.7m and our revenues fell by £4.8m - but what has happened is that the Government has been increasingly generous throughout the year providing us with non-ring-fenced grants to the tune of £4.846m."

He said: "We didn't know we were going to get that at the start of the year. So almost incredibly we have come in with a £1.22m underspend."

Mr Green warned that the situation was a one-off and that the council still faced financial pressures in the years ahead, because income levels had not yet returned to normal.

However, the Government has already given Maidstone an additional £860k in the first three months of this financial year.

Members of the council's policy and resources committee were asked last Wednesday what they wanted to do with the surplus cash, with Mr Green recommending it be added to the council's existing £18.2m reserves.

Cllr Paul Harper (Lab) said that would be "immoral."

He proposed that of the £1.22m some £52,000 should be returned to the Maidstone Museum budget, that £182,00 be used to restore the community grant system for three years so that councillors could support enhancements in their own wards, that £300,000 be used to support cultural activities in the town particularly at the Hazlitt Theatre, that £200,00 be set aside to resource the development of additional non-spatial policies in the emerging Local Plan Review and finally that £150,000 be used to further develop management plans for the borough's conservation areas.

He argued that the cultural expenditure in particular had previously been shown to have a multiple effect on the economy, boosting expenditure four or five times for every pound of support.

He said: "These are measures that will boost our economy and boost our services as we move out of the pandemic."

There was no seconder for his motion.

However, a motion proposed by Cllr David Burton - the new Conservative leader of the council - that the borough allocate £140,000 of the excess cash to the development of non-spatial policies in the emerging Local Plan Review and put the balance into reserves was seconded and approved.

Non-spatial policies are ones not involving the allocation of sites for building, but the support polices about issues like green spaces, green energy and conservation.

The council's expenditure budget is separate from its capital budget, which is money spent on building and infrastructure projects.

Again the council deliberately put a brake on many planned expenditures in the past year and there ended up with an underspend of £8m from a budget of £28m.

That money will be spent once the projects are re-started.

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