“IT’S a start,” Cllr Adam Kirby said this morning as he assessed last night’s Extraordinary Meeting of Woking Borough Council and its desperate struggle with a towering debt mountain.

“To borrow from Winston Churchill, it’s not the beginning of the end, but it is the end of the beginning,” Cllr Kirby, a member of the ruling Liberal Democrat group, added.

“We passed what we needed to pass, it may not be sufficient for the situation but it is a start.”

With council debt forecast to reach £2.4billion in 2024-25, government intervention in some form seems inevitable.

The council has described itself as being  “in Section 114 territory”, an s114 being tantamount to the council being bankrupt and requiring Government assistance.

“It was a sombre meeting with the public galleries full,” Cllr Kirby continued. “This was all about reality.

“It was an achievement to get a balanced budget set for this year and get the council beyond the bare minimum of services.

“But it’s not a sustainable footing. From now, we have to move from operation discovery to operation recovery.

“It was important in the meeting to get past some of the myths surrounding the council’s finances, and I feel we did that.

“The idea that the assets are worth more than the debt, and that they produce enough income, they’re myths that we need to get past.

“There was the odd note of contrition from the Tories [the immediate previous administrations have been Conservative] but there’s still a sense of denial.

“But we have to understand how we got here, that’s how we can go forward.

“There’s no escaping that we’ll need Government help, but what is critical is that we show ourselves to be a reliable partner for the Government.

“We have to show that we are credible, that we can make savings, that we can get back to the true resources of the council, of council tax and real revenue.

"We have to show that we can get through this next year.”