Forecourt slammed as waste of money
Royal Borough: Council leader lays the blame for unpopular station design
The leader of the Royal Borough has criticised the county’s Local Enterprise Partnership board (LEP) for its ‘failure’ over the design of the Maidenhead railway station forecourt.
During a discussion on the establishment of a Berkshire Prosperity Board at Monday night’s full council meeting at the Town Hall, Cllr Simon Werner criticised the LEP’s work and its use of money.
He said: “I’m sure you all feel as strongly as I do about the failure of the station forecourt design to really understand how the LEP was wasting money working with the borough council.”
Cllr Werner said LEP boards ‘dished out central government money on schemes that they dreamt up with the leadership of each council’.
“Some of those ideas were developed and implemented by the LEP working with the previous leadership of the borough and they were quite frankly a bit barmy,” Cllr Werner said.
Cllr Werner said he believes central government also saw the issues and decided to wrap up the LEP funding from the end of March this year, with those budgets being handed back to groups of local authorities.
Maidenhead railway station has been a talking point amongst residents recently, with many raising concerns over lack of a waiting area in the forecourt.
Proposals for the establishment of a new Berkshire Prosperity Board helping to promote the county are currently being discussed by six councils in the area.
The councils who would be involved in the board are the Royal Borough, Slough Borough Council, Wokingham Borough Council, Bracknell Forest Council, West Berkshire Council and Reading Borough Council.
Cllr Werner explained that the new board would focus on areas including health and inequalities and affordable housing and, in the short-term, the LEP would be commissioned to do some of the work, but with the local councils in charge of the projects.
“Then in the future, we’ll be able to make a choice about whether we continue with that relationship or do something different,” Cllr Werner said.
“I very much want to see a pipeline of ideas being developed and not in secret by the council but involving all our partners.”
He added: “This could have amazing benefits for the borough. It’s very little cost to us and it could give us big rewards.”
Welcoming the new board, Cllr Helen Price (TBFI, Clewer and Dedworth East), said: “This strikes me as a good thing, as working collaboratively can bring benefits that working alone just can’t.
“Certainly, the LEP made some very strange decisions which have come back to bite us, for example, Vicus
Way car park, and the Maidenhead station forecourt, and I trust lessons will be learned from this and not repeated.”
The establishment of the new Berkshire Prosperity Board was unanimously agreed.
Alison Webster, CEO of Berkshire LEP, said: “Berkshire LEP is disappointed to hear that Councillors Werner and Price criticised our investment decisions at the full council meeting this week.
“Berkshire LEP is perhaps unique in that all our capital investment decisions have been taken not by the company but by a publicly accountable joint committee, the Berkshire Local Transport Body (BLTB).
“The LEP worked closely with the councillors and officers of our six local authority partners to evidence need, prioritise and implement capital scheme investments across Berkshire and all projects approved by the BLTB would have been supported by the RBWM administration at that time.
“Between 2015 and 2022 Berkshire LEP received £204million of capital grant funding, levering an additional £125million private funding, making a major contribution to significant investments in all of Berkshire’s main towns to enable development, regeneration and support economic growth.”