Here’s one for the local Christmas pub quiz.
Which deluded and misguided socialist project is about to add the equivalent of six entire years of council tax from Sefton’s most prosperous ward to its runaway costs? The answer is the so-called “repurposing” of Bootle New Strand, bought by Sefton’s Labour council for £32.5m in 2017, now worth just £14m, but still costing £2m a year in loan charges, that’s not counting the extra £3m spent in 2018 to “improve the customer experience” in what was meant to be a profit-making enterprise.
Five years on, the reality is that any quality outlets are abandoning a project which was based purely on political dogma, dreamt up by people with little or no practical business experience, who couldn’t even manage a child’s piggy bank.
Marks and Spencer have actually paid an undisclosed amount to break their lease and get out.
Despite such obvious and growing evidence of economic disaster the council continues to throw good money after bad.
Now they have the audacity to propose spending an additional £41m, plus a hoped-for top-up of £7m from the Liverpool City Region fund, on what is only the first phase of a fantasy to create a New Venice on the banks of an un-dredged canal.
The second phase, as yet uncosted, would drag this already botched saga into the 2030s.
Even to the economically unversed this would seem a lorra lorra council taxpayer cash to guarantee and underwrite any future on-site demand for a sausage roll.
Council tax has already risen by nearly 40% since 2012.
Without doubt, Labour will expect another maximum increase in next year’s budget. It is a pocket-picking nonsense which has to stop.
Communities which are contributing most to this fiasco can now only look to Conservative candidates to hold our waste-spending council to account.
In Formby’s Harington Ward, which pays the highest yearly council tax in the borough - more than £7m - and where the council cannot even clear the drains - there is justifiable and growing anger at the unjustified imbalance in spending.
They have a new slogan|: Respect thy neighbour - don’t opt for Labour!
By Cllr Joe Riley, Harington Ward
