Friday brief: Kettering’s cultural scheme would NOT have been approved if county council had been upfront about library roof condition
Plus much more news from Northants
The decision to go ahead with a multi-million pound upgrade of Kettering’s culture and arts quarter would not have happened if the former leaders of Kettering Borough Council (KBC) had known just how bad the library roof was, a councillor said yesterday.
The Cornerstone project, which included a new gallery and refurbishments to the town’s Alfred East Museum has turned into a disaster after leaks in the connected Carnegie library have caused the new gallery opening to be put on hold and now the library has also closed.
Yesterday the cabinet of North Northamptonshire Council (NNC) agreed to put forward £6.8m for a new roof on the Grade II listed building, but Cllr Mark Rowley, who was on the executive of the former KBC said the state of the roof had not been known before the project was approved.
The county council (NCC) had commissioned a report in 2019 which said the roof still had ten years left.
Now on the executive of NNC, Cllr Rowley said:
“If NCC had mentioned the fact of the state of the roof, I’m certain that the executive would not have approved the GLAM [former name] project. We’d have told NCC* [the former county council] to get the roof sorted first before we did anything.”
In 2019 the former county council was in its dying days after having effectively gone bankrupt the previous year.
The former Kettering borough agreed the £4.5m project in 2019 after receiving £3m of funding from enterprise partnership SEMLEP. As part of that project £300,000 had been set aside for library roof repairs.
Yesterday Cllr Helen Howell, who has the portfolio for culture and leisure said exact timescales about when the work would be carried out and the buildings reopened ‘cannot be known’ saying the Collyweston slate needed for the roof has to be quarried to order and had to wait in line.
She reiterated a number of times that £6.8m was a ‘worse case scenario’.
*In the first version of this post we said NNC instead of NCC.
News in brief
The funeral service for trailblazing journalist and newspaper founder Marie Boullemier was held this week. Marie, 76, died last month from breast cancer, which she had beaten twice before.
Hundreds of people went along to the service held at Boughton Church on Monday to pay their respects to a woman who was admired by all who worked with her. Starting out in local newspapers, she set up the Northants Post in the mid 1970s with her husband Tony and was the news editor before going on to run the advertising department. After they sold the paper in the late 1980s Marie went on to run a successful independent gym in Northampton. The couple had two children and four grandchildren.
Read her eulogy as reported in full here by the Northampton Chronicle, for which she wrote the popular column Pandora’s box for many years.
Marie was a supporter and friend to NN Journal and we will miss her.
Significant concerns with how the county’s children’s trust has been carrying out audits of its services was raised at the meeting of North Northamptonshire Council’s executive meeting yesterday.
The trust, which was given overall management of children’s social services in Northants after the failings of the former county council, is currently running well over budget and is predicted to spend an additional £21m more than the two unitary authorities had budgeted.
Cllr Andrew Weatherill, who is chair of the council’s audit committee said he thought the two previous annual audits carried out which gave ‘reasonable’ assurance about the service were out by a ‘country mile’. He said in the first year the trust was in existence (21-22) the situation was so poor that a head of audit could not be identified and there was not a risk based approach. He said the second year a number of core services of West Northamptonshire Council were included in the audit and only a handful of core services of the trust were audited.
He said this year the service is ‘already on the back foot’ as despite being into the third quarter of the current financial year the trust ‘had not really started an audit programme’.
He said the authority was now working more closely with the trust as the organisations were ‘in it together’.
Northamptonshire’s police, fire and crime commissioner has put forward his preferred person to take over the running of the county’s fire service.
Stephen Mold has said he wants former assistant chief constable Nikki Watson to head up the service. Her proposed appointment comes after the departure of the previous fire chief Mark Jones led to controversy when the commissioner appointed his close friend Nikki Marzec to the post. She later stood down. Mold appears to have overlooked the current interim chief Simon Tuhill who is currently acting up to the appointment.
The commissioner explained his decision in a media release this week that said ‘her commitment to public service shone out’ and she has the skills needed to take the service forward.
The Fire Brigades Union has called the proposed appointment ‘insulting and dangerous’. They said Northamptonshire’s chief fire officer needed to have ‘practical experience of keeping firefighters and the public safe’.
The leader of West Northamptonshire Council says that lessons have been learned by the lack of clawback on a historic deal, which saw the authority lose more than £200,000 to help provide jobs that never transpired,
Earlier this month the West authority used emergency powers to spend £3m to buy the former bus depot site from Church’s Shoes. In 2013 the former Northampton Borough Council had helped the private company acquire the site for around £1.6m as the company was promising to expand. The jobs however did not come and since then the firm - which is owned by Prada - has shrunk its Northampton operation. The company stands to make £1m profit from the deal.
Taken to task by the Liberal and Labour groups at the cabinet meeting on Tuesday leader Jonathan Nunn said when the deal was done in 2013 it was ‘an absolute cert that Church’s would expand’ that jobs would be provided on the site.
He said while the aim was for social housing on the site the investment ‘had to wash its face’ and social housing ‘may not be possible’.
The Labour Party has picked its candidate for Wellingborough and Rushden after a rapid selection process. Gen Kitchen was selected by the local party as its parliamentary candidate last Saturday and she may be involved in a by-election in the early part of next year if the recall petition currently open in the constituency gets the required 7940 signatures to remove current MP Peter Bone.
Bone was suspended from parliament last month after being found to have abused his position by bullying a young male staff member and also indecently exposing himself.
The jury continues to deliberate its verdict in the Northampton political donations trial. David Mackintosh, 44, of Station Court, Northampton is co-accused with Howard Grossman, 61, of Greenacres, Bushey, Middlesex of two counts of withholding information from a party treasurer relating to donations.
As soon as the verdict is returned we will send out a report.
Westminster Watch
South Northamptonshire MP Andrea Leadsom has returned to government after being given a junior minister role in the recent government reshuffle, which saw former PM David Cameron appointed as foreign secretary and Suella Braveman sacked as home secretary.
Leadsom, who has previously served in the Conservative cabinet and famously ran against Theresa May to be prime minister in 2016, has been given the position of parliamentary-under-secretary of state in the department of health and social care.
With regard to the Kettering Library roof and the so-called "Executive" (the correct word is "Cabinet" and the leader of NNC shows his constitutional ignorance by insisting on calling it the "Executive") meeting yesterday, and the 2019 survey by NCC.
From the council's background paper for the meeting yesterday:
"The library roof has been in need of repair for some time. However, a survey
undertaken by the former County Council in 2019, prior to the Cornerstone
construction beginning, stated that it would need replacing within 10 years."
In other local news sources, I have seen the state of the roof described, seemingly from the 2019 survey, as "still good for another ten years" and "likely to fail within ten years". I would like to know where the statement in this NNJ article, that "the roof still had ten years left" came from. Clearly, in the blame-shifting game, being played by Helen Howell, Mark Rowley and others too, the exact meaning of the report is being misrepresented for the convenience of each individual talking about it. So far as I am aware, the council is refusing to release the survey report itself, and this is, in my opinion, an absolute disgrace. The report should be placed imediately in the public domain so that the public can make its own judgment of it and the various interpretations that have been voiced.
For myself, I would just point out that the Google Streetview images of the roof from around 2019 are readily to be found, in their proper place, on Google Earth. In them, the roof covering can easily be seen to be in a pretty poor state. So I conclude that, at the time the decisions about Cornerstone were made, it was abundantly clear that substantial work was required on the roof, and that the decision to proceed with the construction phase of Cornerstone (made by NNC) without attending to the roof was incompetent, quite possibly to a culpable degree.
I absolutely think that there should be a full independent inquiry into Cornerstone, and the decisions made around it, and that the reluctance to do this, and the continued concealment of relevant documents, collectively represent a severe shortfall in the integrity of NNC and of its senior members.
Isn’t it possible to hold anybody to account for the criminality of the audits in NCC? The individuals concerned were at least morally bankrupt for doing jobs they weren’t skilled to do. Power over people. Employed by equally incompetent friends. NCT is only overspent based on what was predicted. At one finance meeting I sat in once the finance lead accidentally missed a zero off some figures. You couldn’t make this stuff up. So the predicted figures were probably only as high as somebody could count.
It’s like the eye watering costs of the Newton Europe Farce. Nobody saw the costs recouped in savings as the predicted savings figures turned out to be made up. Nobody cared though. Nobody held accountable. The cost of that would have fixed the roof. The backhanders alone might have.