Labour’s multi million pound bomb shell legacy

A real shock to find they’d committed tax payers to a massive property deal just days before the election!

In the first few months in office we’ve done a lot of ‘cleaning up’ after the previous Labour Administration but what I’m about to write really does take the biscuit!

Tough times now and tougher times ahead financially would generally mean tightening belts and being absolutely focused on squeezing every ounce of value from every tax payers’ pound spent… or so you’d think.

In opposition, we’d been closely scrutinising, criticising and, at times, demolishing Labour’s big plans for new state-of-the-art office buildings in the heart of Stafford. The principle was ok(ish)… getting rid of dozens of administrative buildings in the town and bringing people together in new accomodation known as Tipping Street.

When they kicked it off 2 years ago it was set to cost £25million with theoretical annual savings from bringing people together and getting rid of lots of buildings and extra revenue expense. Theory being the right word!

Our growing criticism in opposition was driven by what appeared to be a much worsening deal with the capital costs of the new buildings climbing and little or no sign of genuine savings identified. In fact quite the contrary.

By early 2009 it was clear that the costs of the project were climbing towards £40million… yes £40million… and the ’savings’ expected were, in reality, additional costs to the tax payer of £500k each year. 

So, in the run up to the County election, we’d pretty well decided this was a non starter and were considering how to get out of it as fast as possible once we’d satisfied ourselves our  understanding from opposition of the worsening position was right.

And six weeks after taking control of Staffordshire we’d decided it was indeed as bad as we thought… actually worse!

But imagine our horror to find that Staffordshire’s previous Labour Administration of 28 years had actually signed on the dotted line without us knowing a matter of weeks before the June election. The deal was effectively done with multi million pound penalties and big legal consequences if we pulled out by breaching the contract.

Welcome to our world since June! And this, by the way, is only one relatively small aspect of the problems we’ve inherited in Staffordshire.

The good news… yes there is some… and the reason I’m only writing about this now instead of before is because we’ve been pulling the property deal apart, negotiating and playing hardball with all concerned, internally to the County and with those making the money.

The hard work has finally paid off  to a great extent and we’ve got a deal which works, we think, for the tax payers of Staffordshire. Nearly 4million has been chopped off the contract cost of the new buildings and instead of it costing tax payers more by doing this we’ve now managed savings on annual running costs of just over £250k and that’s likely to improve further as we move forward. A good job as to pull out would have cost millions down the drain.

But was Labour’s straight jacket deal, signed just weeks before they looked set to lose power, incompetence or intentional?

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