A multi-million pound overspend at Bracknell Forest Council (BFC) has apparently been avoided this year as finance chiefs say they’ve cut it back to less than £500,000.

Council bosses warned in August last year that they were on course to spend as much as £4 million more than they’d planned to by April 2024.

BFC deputy chief executive Stuart McKellar said at the time that extra pressures on social services and housing coupled with a drop in income had led the council into a “very difficult position.”

He added that the prediction was ‘the biggest potential overspend that this council has faced’ and ‘a really, really unusual and challenging position'.

But BFC bosses put measures in place to try and rein the overspend in. By November they reported that the potential overspend had been reduced to a maximum of £2.2 million.

Now newly-published documents say the council could end the financial year having spent close to the budget that was approved in February 2023.

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They say the current predicted overspend is half a million pounds and that the situation could continue to improve until the time the financial year ends on April 5.

The documents say: “The latest forecast for the current year’s position is a potential overspend of under £0.5m.

“With two months of the year remaining and the spending controls introduced earlier in the year remaining in place, this gives a positive indication that expenditure by the year end is likely to be close to the approved budget.”

Bracknell Forest Council’s leading group of councillors – its executive committee – is set to consider the report when it discusses next year’s budget at a meeting on Tuesday, February 6.