Questions
have been asked about the way that Boston Borough Council is handling its bid
for up to £25 million in government funding under the Town Deal Investment Plan
in the wake of a bid for accelerated funding of £750,000 to kick-start some of
the projects.
***
They come from a reader who is In The Know, has
considerable knowledge of how all this works – and who feels that the public is
being kept in the dark.
***
He also believes that one bid – to evaluate the PE21 Project
announced a year ago this month and apparently in hibernation ever since – may well
be nothing more than a face-saving exercise to justify killing the project off.
***
He told Boston Eye: “I read in the Boston
bulletin that there’d been a full council meeting and that they were seeking
this three quarters of a million pounds worth of accelerated project funding.
“That sounds like very good news for Boston, which is
what we all want to hear.
“But I was quite intrigued as to how the projects had
been chosen, so I looked at the full council report of 10th August,
and the report said that the offer was made on 1st July with a
deadline of 14th August to respond.
“Surely between those dates there’s ample time to call
a Zoom meeting of the Town Deal Board and to have a proper discussion
about which projects should be selected towards the £¾ million bit.
***
“And that just didn’t seem to have happened, because
reading further into the report, it says
at one point ‘there is an expectation that the council will consult or engage
fully with the board of the Boston Town Deal in identifying the projects’ – and
then it goes on to say that basically on 7th July the board was
asked what their thoughts were … and so
there was no request for a Zoom board meeting.
“And, of course, we don’t know what members of the
Town Deal Board actually responded because that’s not covered within the
report.
“We then jump to the conclusion that we’ve now told
the Town Board these are the six projects that are going forward.
***
“Interestingly the most recent public meeting of the
Town Deal Board was back on 29th February, but there are
still no minutes published from that meeting.
“I also understand that there have been general calls
for expressions of interest from anyone who thought that they had a worthwhile project
to submit it to the board for consideration as part of the forthcoming bid for
£25 million with a closing date of 13th March.
“But as far as I can see, there hasn’t been any
publication of the expressions of interest that have been received.
***
“So, we don’t know how many there are; we don’t even know
whether these six projects that have now been selected for the £¾ million
actually formed any of the expressions of interest with the deadline of 13th
March.
“It’s not exactly transparent, is it?
***
The bids put forward to the council were for: The Haven
High Academy 3G Pitch Development Project totalling £120,000, Boston College’s
Digital, Transport and Logistics Academy – £182,976, Boston Town Heritage
Projects – £277,700; Experience Boston: Travel, Trade and Influence – £80,000, PE21
Feasibility Funding – £50K, and The Sanctuary, Restore Church – £200,000
towards an inclusive community hub that will focus on supporting homeless and
vulnerable people in the broadest sense
By our reckoning, this comes to £910,000 and a bit
against a ceiling of £750.000.
***
Worst Street acknowledges this and says: “These
projects will now be submitted to Government to ascertain their suitability for
the accelerated funding.
“Whilst not all the projects will be able to access
the funding, as their funding request exceeds the £750,000 allocation, there is
still potential for those that miss out to be included in the Town Investment
Plan which will submitted later this year.”
(This appears to say that some of them are not, which we thought would exclude them from the accelerated grant application -Ed).
***
Our reader has views on some of these projects.
Of the 3g pitch, he says – “to be honest, they are self-funding,
and really don’t need public sector funding for a school to get into this.
“And I also don’t see how hits the three strands that
you have to meet for the town deal funding in the first place.
“That was a surprise one to me.
***
“Some of these are quite chunky amounts of money.
“In the council report, the football pitch, for
example, is seeking £120,000 – but that is only really to top up the Football
Foundation funding which is the main source of funding.
***
“The Boston College project is £183,000, but I don’t
think that I’d come across that before.
“But of course, in the public domain, we don’t know
what bids or expressions of interest were received – as members of the
public, we have never been told.
“We don’t know whether there were six of them; we
don’t know whether there were 60 of them.”
***
He also has issues with the Restore church project.
“There is no mention of how that works with things
like the night shelter at Centenary Methodist Church on Red Lion Street how it
taps in to the Centrepoint Outreach facility – are they duplicating, are they
working in partnership?
“We don’t know.”
***
So – how does he think this should have been done?
***
“For the £¾ million, my view is that they had plenty
of time from 1st July to contact the chairman of the Town Deal
Board, convene a meeting and should have looked at all the expressions that had
been received.
“By this stage one would have thought they knew how
many there were because the closing date was
March, and they also ought to have some idea as to how they ranked them
in order of priority so they actually fit with getting a chance of the £25
million and the criteria attached to
it..
***
“So, they could have then said: ‘We think these are
the top ‘x’ number’ – because as I say, we don’t know, so therefore, as we’ve
got a chance of £¾ million and we think
that these ones are actually deliverable and we can start getting them off the
ground, the town board should have been making that recommendation or that
approval of the projects that they
wanted – but this has been flipped on its head to me, where the borough council have decided.
“… call them their pet projects … PE21; working very
closely with the college.
“But are these the right projects in comparison with
the others?
“Maybe somebody, somewhere, has decided what to take
forward for the £¾ million.
“Surely, if it’s part of the town deal overall picture
it should be the Town Deal Board that is having a greater influence rather than
it just sitting at the borough council and the Town Deal Board being told ‘this
is what we’re doing’”.
***
“And this is my point:
“Who is the decision-maker?
“Who is the accountable body – because I don’t see
that the two are necessarily the same?
***
He said that although the councillors ultimately
approved it … “The chances are that they had a couple of days at best to read it
along with all the other things that have been put under their noses
“It looks fantastic on the face of it, and I’m not
saying that they are necessarily the wrong projects.
“What I’m talking about is the process to get there.”
***
And he has an interesting point of view on the
inclusion of funding to “evaluate” the apparently sleeping PE21 Project.
***
“The PE21 project is a reincarnation of a project from
the mid-1990s called the Modus Project.
The developer was Modus from Manchester, and they were
into massive lending from the Irish banks, so when we had the financial crash,
that scheme got put to one side.
***
“This is really a resurrection of that – but when you
read the report, it doesn’t mention the element of retail that is in there, nor
the best type.
“It went out over a year ago and there was a
feasibility report and a masterplan issued by the borough council which has basically
sat gathering dust until now.
“So, it’s a year out of date, and in fact when you
read the five elements of PE21, each and every one of those makes no economic
sense whatsoever.
***
“Some won’t, because you may be talking about NHS
facilities, and there is also talk about a leisure facility.
“Is that to replace the Geoff Moulder leisure centre?
“But where will all the money be coming from other
than through PE21?
***
“One of the other elements was quite a lot of retail
space within PE21 – but you can understand now, post-COVID, Marks and Spencer’s
and Oldrids and the amount of retail space that we’ve got in the town centre …
why on earth would you start building more off West Street?
“And the hotel.
“There’s no end user for it.
“Nobody wants it and again, financially, nobody in their
right mind would ever see that getting off the ground.
***
“So, they’re going to spend £50,000 on a PE21
feasibility study – and I just wonder whether they’re almost looking for a way
to say ‘you know what, this is dead in the water’.
“They possibly are looking for a way out, because they
built it up, then it’s all gone very quiet.
“It didn’t gain that amount of public support in the
first place with things like the relocation of the bus station – it takes the
bus station potentially down to the railway station, so further out of town and
loss of car parking.
***
“If there was a closing date of 13th March,
what’s happened to all those expressions of interest? Have they all just been thrown away because
they’re concentrating on these six now?
“And have there been even any board meetings that are not
in the public domain – because, surely there would have had been the usual
public notice that the board was meeting … even if the first item was to
exclude the public because of it being a confidential item.
***
“I just wonder whether there had been a further
meeting that was a confidential meeting that maybe gave a bit of priority to
all the expressions of interest but it’s still not in the public domain
“I accept that maybe some of these projects are
commercially sensitive – but you can give it a one-liner so that people see the
sort of magnitude or the lack of expressions of interest that have come
forward.
“But there’s nothing.
“It’s just silence.
***
“Contrast that with the Skegness and Mablethorpe Town
Deal – they met on 27th January, 6th March, 20th
May, 29th May and the 3rd June.
“You go on their website and all the minutes are
there.
“Boston has a strategic partnership, so surely they
should be aligning themselves to work in a very similar way.
“East Lindsey has been seeking public consultation on
bids going forward and holding public Zoom meetings where you can join
in the debate … what a contrast.”
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