Thursday, January 28, 2021

Where the People Friendly money went

TRAFFIC schemes may stop and start but the consultancy gravy train rolls on.
An investigation by Auto Express has found that £412,000 of our money was invested (or wasted, depending on your point of view) in closing the city centre to through traffic.
Of that, £250,622 – yes, a quarter of a million of our hard-earned pounds – went on ‘consultancy and monitoring’ fees. When anyone living or working in Salisbury could have told them for free that the project was poorly designed and ill-timed.
We’re following a predictable and costly outsourcing pattern in public spending here.
Unitary councils such as Wiltshire are put in charge of huge, diverse areas but are kept on such a tight rein that they can’t handle big projects in-house, and have to hand over Boris’s handouts to private companies to help them sort things out.
The results, as we see from our recent experience, can be less than impressive. 
I gather that the Swindon & Wiltshire Local Enterprise Partnership are covering the council's losses. But it's still public money wafting around.
Now I come to think of it, doesn’t that just about sum up the handling of the coronavirus pandemic? 
A massive redistribution of public money, yours and mine, to private sector cronies of the current administration. Look how successful that’s been!
And apart from that 60-odd per cent, what happened to the rest of the LTZ money? 
According to Auto Express, £64,800 was spent on construction (must have been those barriers), £4,328 on road signs (presumably including the ones that told potential visitors to stay on the A36 and head straight on past Salisbury) and £92,250 on enforcement cameras which will at least come in handy when the scheme – hopefully in a much more people-friendly form – is inevitably resurrected.
Because there’s nothing wrong with trying to make Salisbury greener and more people-friendly. You just have to ask local people what that might mean, before you fritter away their taxes.
Oh, and by the way, suspending the project cost another £10-15,000.


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