‘We are being had!’ Wellingborough councillor blasts plan to spend millions renovating office block for unitary staff

Plans by Wellingborough Council to spend almost £3m converting a run-down office block to house unitary staff have been slammed by a councillor who says the county authority should pick up the bill instead.

Labour’s Cllr Andrew Scarborough and colleague Cllr Adam Henley voted against the proposal last night (Marc 11) to use £2.9m of Wellingborough Council’s cash to renovate its Tithe Barn offices.

All eight councils in Northamptonshire will be abolished next April and replaced with two new unitary councils – one to provide service to the North of the county and another to the West.

The Government ordered the unitary reorganisation after the financial collapse of the county council which had been plundering its reserves for years and devising expensive schemes to reshape local services that had not worked.

Preparations are currently going on under the Future Northants programme to work out which unitary services will be provided from what towns and at last night’s meeting the authority’s chief finance officer Shaun Darcy said improving the Tithe Barn offices would give Wellingbororough a better chance of hosting one of the bigger unitary services and being a ‘hub rather than a spoke’.

But Cllr Scarborough, who is one of a select group of 15 councils on the North Northants joint committee who are supposed to be making decisions ahead of the ‘shadow’ councils being set up this May, said this was the first he had heard of the office plan.

He said: “The joint committee has had zero information on property and I have no idea whether and what buildings are going to be required.

“I’m deeply confused by this and I simply do not know whether it is right to spend this money.

“This feels premature and it also feels like money that somebody else should be spending, not us. Yet again Northamptonshire County Council is bringing nothing to the table. It is borough taxpayers’ money that is being spent. We are being had.”

Labour’s Cllr Henley hit out at the small amount of detail contained in the report capital programme monitoring report.

He said: “I’m looking at three paragraphs asking me to commit to spending £3m. It works out at £25,000 a word. It doesn’t feel like there is much of a plan here.”

The report said the building is outdated and the council had commissioned consultants to undertake an officer capacity assessment. The funds would be spent on upgrading mechanical and electrical parts of the building.

Cllr Scarborough asked Mr Darcy if the council spent the funds and did the renovation whether he could be certain that the office block would be used for unitary staff. Mr Darcy said no decisions had been made.

Leader Cllr Griffiths said the renovation of the building would enable Wellingborough to have a ‘strong presence’ in the unitary. The resources committee voted to recommend spending the funds and the final decision will be made by full council.

The cost of setting up the two new councils is estimated to be around £43m. About half the cash is coming from business rates plus each of the borough council’s have committed just under £2.5m towards the cost with the remainder being paid by NCC.

The cost of the Tithe Barn renovation would be additional and take Wellingborough Council’s unitary spend to £5.4m.

It has not been made public which offices in which towns are being considered as bases for unitary council services. It was decided earlier this month to host full council meetings of the new unitary at the Kettering Conference Centre.Currently most of the county council’s 3,000 plus staff (who will become unitary staff) are based at One Angel Square in Northampton, the £53m headquarters that the county council opened in September 2017, just months before its financial collapse. It then had to sell off the building in April 2018 to help pay off its debts.