No Spinning Point spin – it’s time for independent review
SO here we are. Almost a decade after Rossendale Council decided to divert money from Haslingden Baths to fund the purchase of the Valley Centre in Rawtenstall to trigger new regeneration in Rossendale’s largest town, the council has now decided it’s not going to build something new on the site.
The reason it gave was that Rawtenstall is thriving anyway. A council report seemed to do its best to bury their huge U-turn and sought to claim credit for the upturn in Rawtenstall’s fortunes based on the fact the council knocked down the Valley Centre. Apparently, this gave businesses the confidence to open up with new bars, shops and restaurants. Really?
It’s quite reasonable to argue that buying the Valley Centre and demolishing it has helped the regeneration of Rawtenstall. It was an ugly eyesore that blighted the town.
To argue that what’s followed since the demolition of the Valley Centre - years of confusion, disagreement, rethinks and multiple promises of flats, spas, shops, hotels and leisure facilities on the site - has played a part in Rawtenstall’s regeneration is, frankly, nonsense.
Business hates nothing more than uncertainty. And that’s what Spinning Point has delivered, in spades, in Rossendale’s primary town centre.
Yes, there’s a bus station - where we’re still waiting to see if anyone will occupy the retail units, and how long primary operator Transdev will keep running all the services it does today - and the redevelopment of the Town Hall, which has brought 30 jobs into the town centre thanks to the organisation which now occupies it.
But it’s hard not to see everything around it as anything but a fiasco. The months of wrangling with the Royal Mail over access to the Kay Street sorting office during work, the persistent failure to even consider parking as a key part of the plan, the alienation of traders and local civic groups who time and again felt ignored or insulted by the council and certain councillors.
The council’s communications over Spinning Point have been shocking. Quick to celebrate the positive, but the council has gone out of its way to play down any problems. Even the proposal to scrap the second phase was dressed up as ‘re-appraising Rawtenstall - a 2040 vision’ in the council’s agenda for its meeting last week.
Dress it up any which way you like, but what we have here is a colossal waste of time, money and effort which deserves proper investigation and answers. Whereas the Empty Homes Scandal - £5m and counting to the council - was always said to have happened because councillors were kept in the dark, the same can’t be said about the Spinning Point Fiasco.
This is a project which has been driven by the current Labour administration, originally by former regeneration boss Andy MacNae before being handed over to leader Alyson Barnes when he stepped back. Several councillors are, or have been, on the board of the RTB Partnership, the council’s company with developer Barnfield.
If this latest move is a surprise to them, it should be a real worry to us.
It’s suggested this change of heart will cost £1.4m, part of which is repaying a grant for the scheme. Around £500k will be spent on improving the Town Square space and hopefully turning it into something much nicer than what’s there now.
But what of the money already spent? Go back through council reports over the years and hundreds of thousands of pounds have flowed into this project. Worryingly, the council report says the split of liability for ‘design, architects, feasibility studies and planning application costs’ will need to be agreed by Barnfield. How much? And how much each?
And what of the time and effort put in by the council? The consultations, the promotion, the various departments all pulled in from time to time, like the tendering process for two contracts to design the new spa the council wanted to build. Were those contracts issued, and if so, how much?
How many loans does the council now owe against the project? Has the sale of Rossendale Transport now been wasted? What about the money from selling the bus depot? Are more services at risk now the council has to find another £1.5m and won’t get any income from the site, now it’s not building anything there?
And that’s before we return to the time and effort of all the businesses and organisations who found themselves involved. What a mess.
Rossendale Council needs to subject itself to independent review of what’s happened - and make every aspect of the project public too.
This is our money. Rossendale Council is a council which rightly complains about budget cuts. £1.5m is therefore a huge amount of money to take out of its savings, and it’s reasonable to assume that if all the money spent was added up, publicly, today, this would prove to be an incredibly expensive error.