Levelling what? Culture hub gets a high cost operator and no liaison with current offer organisations.

 

The news let out by the operator selected by Northumberland Conservatives, Whitley Bay’s JAM JAR who have been chosen to deliver Conservative Culture in the town of Blyth is that they have the green light to get this show on the road.

This leak brought out community leaders from across the Town to ask the questions of where do they fit in?

Blyth nas a number of charitable and community initiative companies who deliver local well defined culture operations right across Blyth with very little support from the Conservatives at County Hall who are commissioning this monolith using so called levelling up money when most community leaders don’t think it's required at all.

The news report seems to have upset those who may have thought that inclusion and not exclusion is the way of changing culture in society when the history of Communities working together Blyth has sits like the elephant in the room.

The Town has been well covered off over time with a series of Community Centres, Town Centre Youth Provision, a well attended Theatre also showing movies, sports clubs, village halls and the Towns churches working together, competition is certainly not the name of the game whatever political colour operates from County Hall in Morpeth.

Therefore it seems people need to have a number of questions answered and they don’t include a high powered news report from a contractor who isn’t used to working in an area where service users have very little surplus to support businesses.

It may be that the County Council is fully funding this operation from the £2.1m surplus it has found under the doormat at County Hall after they had informed the world they had a £17m shortfall in their accounts. If so, why can’t the other operators who have been sitting in Blyth for decades get access to funding and deliver the ‘Culture message’ as written in whatever contract JAM JAR has been saddled with?

Or is it going to end up with a rift between tradition and the newbies or will it simply be a service that succeeds while the stressed community leaders have to find a novel way of coping with a ‘big brother’ operation sitting on their doorstep in a brand new low maintenance and low energy use building while they struggle to find the funds to keep their operations on track.

https://www.northumberlandgazette.co.uk/news/politics/council/jam-jar-cinema-to-open-in-blyth-as-part-of-new-culture-hub-as-council-approves-funding-for-project-4135430