Independent Review Critical of County HQ Plan

Plans by the Labour administration at Staffordshire County Council to move the Authority’s central Stafford office accommodation to a new purpose built headquarters costing council tax payers a total of £43million have been criticised by a specialist review team.

In June this year the plans were finally put on hold after 10 months of criticism from the County’s opposition Conservative group.

The County Council recently released the report by the Government sponsored Gateway Review initiative, confirmed long standing Tory concerns.

The review summary says that four of the five key areas are ‘red’ for critical with the other one being assessed as ‘amber’. As a general rule if any of the categories under review are ‘red’ the whole project is considered too risky to continue.

Conservative Spokesman for Resources, Ian Parry says the report justifies our dogged opposition to the plans. He explains,

“Spending any amount of public money has to be fully justified but the £43million that Labour were going to spend on an ill conceived and ill planned scheme was unacceptable. The Conservative team worked tirelessly to convince the controlling group that there were major problems with their plans. This highly critical independent report confirms we were correct to fight the plans from the start”.