It will be ‘slash and burn’ at the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead unless a huge increase in council tax is approved, the council’s top boss has warned.

The council wants permission from the government to raise council tax beyond the five per cent cap after discovering a £16 million black hole in its finances.

Council leaders and officials say that if they can’t do this, the council will go effectively bankrupt – with government-appointed commissioners sent in to take over.

Chief executive Stephen Evans said the council is facing an ‘existential crisis’. He said going effectively bankrupt would mean ‘commissioners going in and taking slash and burn decisions, and the local authority and councillors lose control’.

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Mr Evans was speaking at a meeting on Wednesday November 13, where councillors discussed a response to a report into the council’s finances by public sector accounting group CIPFA.

The report published last month warned the council is on the brink of effective bankruptcy.

If this happens, the government will send commissioners to either take control of the council or order it to take drastic measures to recover.

Councillor Helen Price asked senior officers to explain why being under commissioners’ control was worse than the council having to take drastic decisions itself. She also asked what would be left of council services at the end of the process.

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She said: “What we’re being offered is one solution, we’re not offered alternatives to consider. But there is an alternative which is we go down a route which everyone says you don’t touch with a bargepole. But I’d like to understand why it is so terrible.”

She added: “What is there after that we have on the sunny uplands eventually? If we go down this route, this is for the long term good of what – what would there be left?

“We’re going to go through all of that pain but what is there going to be at the end of it?”

Elizabeth Griffiths, the senior manager in charge of council finances, said issuing a Section 114 notice would mean the council would lose control to the government commissioners.

She said: “It will be people who don’t know the area, don’t know the services, don’t know the locals, don’t know the councillors, don’t know the staff, coming in and taking more removed decisions quickly.”

She added: “The really key thing is the idea that we’re going to have to raise council tax.

"We can’t cut any further – where we are is a consequence of the cuts that have been made in the past.

“Without a significant injection of funding there just isn’t a way out of it. We can’t get out of this just by generating more and more savings because there just aren’t the savings there to be able to do it.”