FINANCE officers are to be trained by some of the UK’s leading experts to ensure Slough’s financial crisis does not happen again.

But councillors at an audit and corporate governance meeting questioned this as they partly blamed the current finance officers for the council issuing a section 114 notice.

Last month, the borough was forced to freeze all non-essential spending to fix its money woes.

One of the main factors the town got into this mess was the council had ‘insufficient capacity and skills’ within the finance team as well as ‘inadequate’ preparation of financial statements.

This is where the council’s new chief financial officer, Steven Mair, and his so-called “A-team” of accountancy and finance experts step in and will train the local authority’s officers to ensure this crisis does not happen again.

READ MORE: Cash-strapped Slough Council will need to save £20m per year

Mr Mair said at the meeting the temporary staff will be here for two years to identify problems and change the council’s direction.

The chairman of the meeting, councillor Waqas Sabah (Lab: Farnham) questioned why the current finance team, who are being paid thousands by the council, are being trained and kept on the payroll instead of hiring fresh blood.

He said: “We’ve got the staff that were hired to be experts in their field of accounts, they’re being paid a salary, they’ve done the job wrong for a number of years, they’ve put us in a situation, and now you’re going to keep them on the payroll, get experts in that’s costing us millions to train the same people up to do the job they were hired to do instead of bringing in experts to resolve the problem in a short amount of time at taxpayers’ expense.

READ MORE: Slough Conservatives call for full election next year

“How does that make sense that you would not bring in experts instead of training somebody that was hired from day one to do that job and they haven’t done it properly?”

In response, Mr Mair said he will be bringing a strategy in October to identify which staff are capable but need guidance from experts.

He also said a mass sacking of the finance department would not resolve the issue where the council would then have to fill in those posts, which could prolong the issue even further.

The audit meeting took place on July 29, Thursday.