Taxpayers in hole for £5.5m
Reporter NORTHUMBERLAND taxpayers lost £5.53m over aborted plans to move County Hall.
Council accounts reveal the final cost of a scrapped scheme to move headquarters to Portland Park, in Ashington, which was begun by the previous Labour administration but halted when Conservative councillors took power last year.
The loss covers the £1.4m paid out to cancel the contract for the works, a figure council leader Peter Jackson had previously announced.
But it also includes £2.1m which had already been paid out for designs of the new building, and a further £2.1m on work done to prepare the site.
Since the move was cancelled, £10m has been spent on road, drainage and utility works to ready the area for its new planned use as a shopping and cinema development. Meanwhile, £17m was set aside to refurbish the Morpeth county hall instead of relocating.
The cancellation proved controversial, with some Ashington residents staging protests over the “abandonment” of the site, and arguing the service industry jobs a retail park would bring were not what the former mining town needed.
The announcement of the final cost provoked further fury from Labour councillors, who claimed the £32m new HQ would have regenerated Ashington.
A spokesperson for the council’s Labour group said: “Peter Jackson should own his decisions instead of trying to mislead his way out of them. He announced with great fanfare that he was stopping 900-plus jobs coming to Ashington, and it’s clear he didn’t care about the cost.”
He accused council leader Peter Jackson of “breaching the trust of the people of Northumberland” and accused Coun Jackson of being “deceptive” about the full cost of the policy.
Coun Nick Oliver, who holds the council portfolio for corporate services, blamed the previous administration for the £4.2m initially spent.
He added: “The Tory group before the election called for break clauses in the contract, in case we won the election, because we knew the move wasn’t supported by the electorate. Labour refused to do that.
“This is still hugely less expensive than the cost of moving 900 jobs from Morpeth to Ashington.
“It is absolutely the right thing to do because you’re talking about £5m to stop something that would cost tens of millions more than that and wasn’t necessary”.
A council spokesperson added: “This overall figure comprises of £2.1m which covers all the design works before tender, the £1.4m cost of cancelling the contract and a further £2.1m on ongoing plot development works which we hope can be used by any new developer of the site.
“The work undertaken by Arch and their consultants during the design and procurement stage for the building was part of the previous administration’s Capital Budget and this spending is not something the current council did or would have sanctioned.
“We are continuing to progress a number of options for the Portland Park site which will not just benefit Ashington, but the whole county.”