Fancy spending all that money to make an exhibition of yourself?

 

The real secrets of the cost of spending on a six year as yet unfinished, unused and futureless County Hall in Morpeth which the Leader of the Conservative administration in May 2017, Councillor Peter Jackson said: “It only needs a lick of paint” is bound to pour out at sometime from one or other of the four infighting factions whose open warfare between Conservatives, ultra right wing Tories and mobs is a mini mirror image of what's going on in Westminster.

So while we're waiting for the revelation that explains why the stripping out of reserves and increased borrowing to glamourise a useless empty shell has led to the ‘current state of the Council’, poverty up, children in need up, potholes up, litter up, recycling centres closed, planning abysmal, unsuitable local plan, all new build to be crammed in 3% of the council's area, huge shortage of social and council housing to cover need, less and less busses, sports centres struggling, public assets up for sale, council slashing care packages and the albatross of levelling up hanging around the necks of the two top Councillors, Sanderson and Wearmouth along with their policy of employing hybrid staff being paid well over £100,000 per year and not living in the same universe as the Council they now work for.

The hybrids may not yet realise their new employer is a Council which is now famous for bullying staff as well as its disgraceful links, huge promotion and loss of Britishvolt with its haphazard business plan of spending huge sums of investors cash on bingeing out at the ‘Festival of Speed’ killing off its chances of ever getting 3000 people working in the River Blyth basin. The whole debacle leaves Britishvolt as just a tarnished name to sell on and on and on and the Council darkened by its shadows.

Setting aside the new facts that most of the mob's hybridised top team based in London, Wales and the West Midlands will never get to see the building unless they become curious enough to visit on their holidays its history shows the change in local government that those who seek the return of Castle Morpeth DC and its decadent loose ways haven’t recognised.

History shows a decision was taken in 1977 by the then Conservative-Independent alliance to move their 12,000 office staff from Newcastle and Northumberland market towns to house them under one roof on the extreme outskirts of Morpeth and of no real commercial value to the Town itself, to micromanage their gigantic centralised workforce (sounds very Tory doesn’t it). The Queen Mother laid a foundation stone in 1979 and the monolith opened in 1981 under a different administration.

The slippage towards its current almost void status began immediately as it was quickly realised by the incoming Labour minority administration in 1981 that running a council so large needed people to see people on the ground in the many market towns spread across such a huge area.

With Government cutbacks particularly through the Thatcher and more recent Austerity Conservative Governments staff have disappeared into the ether at a massive rate and another Labour minority administration 2013-2017 planned a move to a central location in the Town of Ashington 4 miles as the crow flies to house the 750 office based staff from the Morpeth site. A move based on a fixed price contract valued at £32M that would be the saviour of commerce in Ashington, a hugely deprived area. Far less than a six year refurb on a relic in Morpeth.

The Tories won the 2017 election and stopped that move paying huge costs to the contractor on site at the new building and began their gross spend on their albatross at Morpeth.

With office based staff now down to the very low hundreds since 2017, a building setup for 12,000 would have a bit of spare space you would think?. It has so much spare space that the Tories are pushing it as the ‘Great North Exhibition Centre’ which the miserable among its residents who point towards the massive exhibition space available in the regional cities of Newcastle, Sunderland and Durham can’t quite grasp.

The County of Northumberland has a number of excellent Sports and Community facilities as well as empty District Council buildings large enough to house 67 Councillors and their attended office staff. It's time some lovely soft seats for the regular Conservative members sleepy time at meetings were purchased and shipped around the county for its full council meetings which are held a maximum of 10 times per year with a committee room at Morpeth’s new Leisure Centre which has a car park, is central to the Town and may be of some use commercially to house its committee meetings, so that the huge public cost burden, expensive drain on much needed revenue that heating and lighting a monolith costs is taken off the shoulders of the Council Taxpayer and then lift the dead albatross from the necks of Councillors Wearmouth and Sanderson, or do they like the fishy smell?