BCP Council will need permission from government to balance its budget by borrowing - even if it completes a planned sell-off of assets by the end of March.

The local authority currently has a "minded to" award from the Department of Levelling Up, Housing and Communities to borrow £20million for the current year’s transformation programme.

An application for this sum was made last summer after the government intervened to block a plan to use money from selling thousands of beach huts to a wholly or majority council-owned company.

In a change of tack, BCP Council’s Conservative administration set about trying to plug the financial gap by selling assets.

The transformation programme budget already included money from asset sales when it was approved a year ago.

Councillors agreed to additional disposals to address the in-year funding issue at a meeting last month, with Wessex Trade Industrial Centre in Poole, Airfield Industrial Estate in Christchurch, 35 Willis Way at Fleet Industrial Estate in Poole and land at Crescent Road to be sold.

The Daily Echo has been told by the council that the authority remains confident that these assets, along with those originally in the 2022/23 budget, will be sufficient to cover the transformation costs.

This is despite the report on the proposed budget for 2023/24 stating it will be “challenging to deliver at least £4.3m of the £7.4m originally assumed 2022/23 asset sales”.

However, regardless of the situation with asset sales, the council requires the capitalisation direction, if approved, to cover £1.92m for children’s services transformation programme.

A BCP Council spokesperson said: “The current position is that the council need to fund £19.9m for transformation this year. We’ve already raised £1.9m through capital receipts, and plan to raise the remaining £18m needed for the Transformation Programme from in-year asset sales in 2022/23.

“In addition we have spent £2m on children’s services that cannot be funded through the flexible use of capital receipts, so it is assumed it will be funded via a capitalisation direction this financial year.

“The council continues to be assured that the additional asset sales agreed at January council will be finalised before March 31, 2023, to enable the funding gap to be covered.”