East Worthing and Shoreham Labour Party

a million pounds of misspent public funds, smoking over the wasteland

Though the story of the great Fishersgate fiasco is still to be told, the outlines and the themes are already visible. Over-arching everything, within Adur District Council, was the glaring lack of an appropriate structure for administering the project, the absence of a framework of standards relevant to major community regeneration, the lack of oversight, lack of scrutiny, the lack of accountability. Apart from that everything was hunky dory. 

But that’s just context; as is the undoubted desire, at once highhanded and condescending, to help and improve the life of a community.  I mean, imagine, cobble together a group of well-meaning and enthusiastic residents, match them up with serious money and a dodgy developer, scurry around wheeling and dealing like Derek Hatton, twisting arms and pulling the wool over.  Then, when the whole careening, Heath Robinson structure leaps the tracks....wipe hands and walk away, leaving a wreckage of lives and opportunities, a million pounds of misspent public funds smoking over the wasteland.
That’s the context. The issues transcend the context.
There is a contract between those who govern and those who are governed: the institutional framework of responsibilities and rights; the moral imperative of the duty of care.
The issue is that when the project was shown to be demonstrably untenable - as it always had been, but that a different story - Adur District Council just...closes the file. Hey, that’s not fair! They tried to sort it out! They called a conference of the great and good. The MP was there, every agency and its dog was there, Sport England who’d just tossed a few hundred thousand crisp ones down the project without checking the invoices, turned up with its legal team - they even promised to take it on as long as the Fishersgate Community Association played the game and signed a gagging order. A what?! A gagging order. That’s not too much, surely - it’s only for 12 years. No one need know, no one needs to know.
But those ungrateful little people, the unwitting Trustees, did say no. They would not give up their right to tell the truth.  You’re on your own then. The file is filed, the door is shut, the caravan moves on.
Beware the little people: when you ain’t got nothing, you’ve got nothing to lose. Their day in Court lasted 5 years.  The little people are the last ones standing.  The ones who should have been in Court are looking angrily and nervously on.
Justice is about balance, so what can balance out the wrong done? Over to you, Adur District Council.