The Heart of Slough project has now moved to the stage where English Partnerships is providing the master planning work required to bring the scheme to outline planning permission during the spring. This means the scheme is finally moving towards implementation.

Management arrangements within the Council are that the Partnership Board continues to be chaired by the Chief Executive. Property Services will now act as client to the external experts that have been working on this scheme alongside Council Officers for some time. The Members' Panel will continue to oversee the project.

Before the opposition begin to complain about use of expensive consultants I will remind them of two things. First, an even larger group of external consultants were engaged on this project by them when they were in charge of it. Second, this is a massive regeneration scheme and it would be quite inappropriate and foolhardy for us to require our Officers to proceed without specialist support as they put together this complicated regeneration project. Indeed if we did not hire appropriate expertise we would be open to criticism that we might not be getting the best deal possible for the town.