What are they trying to hide?
Readers will be aware of HDC’s announcement that around £150,000 had been spent on professional fees dating from October 2016 to late 2019, leading to a detailed submission to HDC (i.e itself!) proposing Rookwood as a site suitable for 1,000-1,100 new homes.
None of the consultants’ reports has been made freely available to the public, apart from the submission document itself (a necessity anyway as part of the submission process).
Given the huge public interest in this matter, isn’t it time that HDC published all these reports, including the oft very revealing viability assessment?
Even the online contracts register fails to record details of the contracts involved, apart from one, a spend of £17,000 for ‘Ecology Support Services’.
Despite repeated requests for this information, HDC has failed to provide the relevant contract details, including project briefs and procurement processes undertaken.
What are they trying to hide? Surely due process in procurement would have been followed, wouldn’t it?
On the other hand, if the government can readily abandon such rules when procuring PPE at haste, then who knows what can happen when such a highly contentious development project needs to be kept ‘under wraps’, apparently without even the knowledge of the Ward Councillors?
No doubt HDC will continue to hide behind Freedom of Information regulation exemptions comforted by the knowledge that referral to the information commissioner will take many months, and therefore be ‘after the event’ i.e. Rookwood’s future will, by then, have been sealed.
Wind back to late 2017, under case reference FER0690402 relating to North of Horsham viability documents, when the commissioner’s decision notice report ‘determined that information had been wrongly withheld’ and ordered HDC to ‘disclose the withheld information to the complainant’.
Subsequently, at HDC’s Scrutiny Committee meeting in September 2018, the following was minuted: ‘Members commented the report had highlighted errors in the way the council acted and that the senior officers involved had now left the council, so it was not practicable to ask them why they believed that the exemptions applied. Lessons had been learnt and the members felt nothing more could be achieved at this stage. The committee felt total openness was guaranteed as a result of this decision’. Oh really? I don’t think so!
PAUL KORNYCKY
Cox Green, Rudgwick