24 November (Part 2) - Would you buy a used car…
Who makes the decisions that have got Bexley Council into financial hot water?
The Council Leader must bear a great deal of the responsibility, she (and he in
the past) oversees the recruitment of the top brass who run the show.
Recently people with a track record of failure have been recruited from other
London boroughs. If you go back 15 years or more to the Labour Administration, someone decided that the Thames
Innovations Centre was a good idea and it bled cash until very recently.
During
the corruption ravaged years of the noughties the Leader himself milked the
system and when he was found out and ended up in Court for a piffling amount
fiddled at the GLA our present Leader refused to report him to the police for a
ten times bigger fiddle perpetrated in Bexley. You can get an idea of what went on from just one email.
Cook the books and hide it from the Auditor. Those were the days!
Should anyone put their trust in such people?
Bexley Council has been, maybe still is, the seventh biggest municipal property gambler in
the country. £34·2 million spent between 2016 and 2018. Not only the old
Blockbuster store in Sidcup but Wickes in Erith (£8·7 million), Pier Road in
Erith, Erith Post Office for £925,000, the Job Centre in Broadway, the old NHS
site opposite Barnehurst station, and the now notorious Erith Distribution
Centre which cost it £9·8 million.
All “to enhance economic viability for the benefit of local people”.
Going in the opposite direction the Council sold what used to be Lamorbey Baths in
Sidcup for £750,000 and the new owner sold it on for £1,950,000. “Enhancing
the economic viability?” A good one Bexley!
Blockbuster, with very unfortunate timing, is to become a Council Cinema
and the Distribution Centre earned not a penny in rent and is now to be sold at
a loss to part fund the redundancies which might save Bexley from bankruptcy.
The investment in shops doesn’t look so clever now; maybe shares in Amazon would have been a better bet.
BexleyCo has not yet sold a single house and what is this
investment in Rockfire
Capital all about? [Note to self, must find time to look into that.]
Who decides on these dodgy investments?
It’s easy enough to blame the present crew made up of Jackie Belton (CEO), Paul Thorogood (Finance Director), David Leaf
(Cabinet Member for Resources) and Teresa O’Neill (Council Leader) but the
misjudgments can be traced back to well before them. BexleyCo was first
mentioned here in April 2017 so both it and the sale of the Baths predate all of
these people apart from the Leader herself.
It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Bexley gets to where it is because
the wrong people are recruited by the wrong people who were recruited in earlier
years. Senior Councillor jobs are just a Merrygoround of back slapping, leg ups
and jobs for the girls - well it is mainly girls.
Note: Some of the historical figures shown above were sourced from
the 853blog.