Northumberland County Council cabinet member for education Cllr. Guy Renner Thompson has been to the press and made statements about the County Council’s shortfall in funding to build a new high school in Berwick.
In deciding to build this new school the Northumberland conservative council have decided to put 142 jobs on the line with parents and residents of Wooler and Berwick accusing the Council of not having a proper plan in place. With the huge cost of school transport spiralling even more noticeable since Trump began his war against Iran, closing schools many miles away from their proposed alternative will be a millstone around the necks of the County Council for decades to come.
The job hasn’t begun, yet the costs have been bloated much higher than inflation for a project that was published last year at running out at £50m the county's cabinet member has stated. It now has risen by 22% to £64m. In one financial year.
The rise in costs are enormous, having jumped from £22M from when the Tories were going to deliver this project in 2022 up to almost three times that cost.
The department of education who didn’t fund this new build from its inception planning stage during 2017 when the Tories took office at County Hall and a long standing Tory Government sat in Westminster are still now dubious about the council cabinet member for education's verbal public costs.
His costs have been called out by the Labour MP for Berwick for clarity and he has asked that County Hall opens its books to Government scrutiny to ensure that the true costs are brought out.
With Government and Local Government civil servants appearing not to be convinced that Northumberland Conservatives have improved on their secrecy one jot since the Max Caller Report. It was published in June 2022 and was a damning governance review that found the authority to be "dysfunctional," "distracted," and paralyzed by internal battles between political leadership and senior management labelling the ruling Councillors ‘bullies’.
That dysfunctionality still exists as the Council have failed to deliver best value for the last nine years and are ‘famous’ in local government circles for not publishing their Key Performance Indicators and where they sit in national league tables to let its Council Taxpayers scrutinise what they pay heavily for.
How can a constantly failing Council expect to be believed when they have not bothered to deliver what people really want in order to prioritise ‘glamour projects’ that will mean very little in a few years time.
https://www.northumberlandgazette.co.uk/education/councillor-frustrated-with-government-over-funding-for-new-berwick-high-school-8664320
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c62z7j830l4o#:~:text=After%20a%20consultation%2C%20Northumberland%20County,high%20school%20in%20the%20town.
https://etheses.durham.ac.uk/id/eprint/7227/
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