Council should have listened to warnings, argues Danczuk

Date published: 19/08/2008

Rochdale’s Labour Parliamentary Candidate, Simon Danczuk, has dismissed the Council’s explanation for their costly decision to re-run the town centre regeneration developer selection process as a “complete whitewash”.

Mr Danczuk has been the fiercest critic of the way the council has conducted the town centre regeneration and repeatedly called for the Council’s Executive Director, Andy Zuntz, to explain whether the public consultation formed part of the criteria on which the proposals were judged.

“Mr Zuntz would not respond to this question and this would not have helped legitimise the selection process,” he argued. “They are trying to hide behind obscure Greek case law when the real reason is that they are legally bound to publish the criteria on which they judged the bids. They haven’t done this because they failed to take into account the views of the public when selecting their preferred bidder. This is why they’ve ended up in a legal mess that has cost Rochdale tax payers an exorbitant amount of money.”

In strongly worded criticism of the Council and the Rochdale Development Agency (RDA), Mr Danczuk said that he had made every effort to warn officers and politicians that the process was flawed and had been ignored at every step of the way.

“We’ve been saying for a long time that this is a farce,” he said. “I fully expected the selection process to be re-run because it was a flawed procedure. The chairman of RDA called me ‘an outsider’ when I pointed this out and the Council’s Chief Executive Roger Ellis threatened Councillor Allen Brett when he called the consultation a “sham”. They’ve tried as hard as possible to hide these monumental failings and responded to critics in a contemptuous and arrogant manner. I seriously hope they will now consider resigning over this fiasco. If they had listened to this ‘outsider’ from the start we could have saved many thousands of pounds of taxpayers’ money.”

Mr Danczuk is now calling on the council to publish the full legal costs, which they incurred in defending a position he described as “foolish”.

“We’re aware that the council have been flying in lawyers from Brussels to defend their position and it’s only right that Rochdale’s taxpayers are aware of this waste,” he added.

He added that this expensive and embarrassing u-turn completely vindicated Councillor Jackie Beswick’s decision to call for the selection process to be held up to scrutiny earlier this year. “This was never allowed because the Lib Dems whipped all their councillors and forced the issue through,” he explained. “You shouldn’t whip councillors at Scrutiny Committee and this was clearly designed to try and cover up mistakes.”

He also made reference to the fact that the preferred developer, Wilson Bowden, which has recently seen its share price plummet and has had to halt work on a number of developments, was selected to regenerate the whole of Rochdale, not just the town centre. “I hope the Council and RDA will learn from their mistakes and not put all their eggs in one basket again,” he said.

“We need to see much better leadership and smarter decision making from our Council and the RDA,” he stressed. “We’ve just seen the Liberal Democrat run Council in Stockport announce that their £500 million town centre development has collapsed and I so not want to see the same happen here.”