Councillors wash over damning report

SENIOR members of Thurrock’s ruling cabinet barely passed comment when a report that damns officers and councillors came before them.

The independent report into the botched handling of a planning application finally came before the Council’s senior decision-makers on Wednesday but though it contained harsh criticism of councillors and officers it took just a few minutes of councillors’ time before they passed it back to the chief executive to administer.

The original planning application for the former Dominoes gym in High Street, Grays, brought the Council into conflict with Thurrock Thames Gateway Development Corporation and at one point led to the possibility of a costly High Court Judicial Review being made into the Council.

Thurrock planning councillors supported the plan and gave it planning permission – a decision that was overturned by members of the full council at an emergency meeting.

Council chief executive Angie Ridgwell then commissioned an independent review into what had happened – at a cost of £14,000.

When the report came before members of the standards review committee in June, watchdog Peter Wallis was critical of the Council, saying: "It's pretty obvious that there has been an almighty cock-up, there has been no dialogue between councillors and officers, with officers all at sixes and sevens, arising in utter confusion."

At the same meeting Labour group leader John Kent was even more scathing of the report, saying: "Having looked carefully through this report it has not clearly identified what went wrong and what was the nub of the problem of this sorry saga. I had hoped that this report would have got under the skin of the members to find out what happened but it has not done that."

The standards committee felt that the appropriate place to hold a review of what had happened and any public condemnation of councillors or officers was at Cabinet but when it came to the crunch the senior members of the council chose to pay lip service and they will have no further input into the issue, leaving it to officers.

EDITOR’S COMMENT:
What price democracy in Thurrock Council?

That’s what sprang to mind at Wednesday’s meeting when senior councillors chose not to debate or discuss an embarrassing episode in their administration - apparently having been lobbied beforehand not to rock the boat or go public in their criticism of officers.

So effectively what happened in the debacle over the Dominoes planning application has been washed over and the public will never know.

Though the report into the issue, which taxpayers have paid for, is in the public domain, it is wishy-washy and doesn’t really say what happened.

Instead we are left to speculate on why experienced councillors put their heads in the sand and backed a clear loser, putting vast amounts of council cash in jeopardy.

Nor does it pinpoint the officers who didn’t do their jobs properly.

In short, no-one was to blame and no-one is accountable.

Can we be sure the same thing won’t happen again? Well recommendations have been made and are supposedly being put in place.

But they will be administered by the same people who got it so very wrong in the first place.

To be frank it all smacks of a whitewash. No accountability, no sense of responsibility to the taxpayers and no sense of honesty.

I disagree with much of the Labour mantra that local opposition leader John Kent supports, but in this instance he certainly got it right when he said: “I had hoped that this report would have got under the skin of the members but it has not done that."

It seems the Conservative administration is so thick-skinned it can’t, or daren’t, face up to its obligations in this instance – or perhaps they are running scared of the officers who are supposed to be serving them.

Call me a cynic but something in this equation is very wrong!

Thurrock Gazette