Look at the Size of my War Chest

An attempt through the "Call in" process by the Independent group on the Borough Council to stop the sale of Archway Cottages. Abington Park unfortunately failed and fell on deaf ears on Wednesday night, but the outcome of the meeting is well worth sharing with the general public of Northampton. These wonderful grade II listed cottages which date back from the 1670's were gifted to the people of Northampton by Lady Wantage in 1892 (as was all of Abington Park) but the current ruling Liberal Democrats on the Council want to sell them on to the highest bidder.

Our challenge led by the Councils Heritage Champion and fellow Independent Cllr Jean Hawkins was based around real and evidential concerns that the Councils cabinet had not looked at all the other options open to it, and that their decision was directed and predetermined by the administrations own priorities. We argued that the cottages could be kept in public use and used for a variety of community purposes, or by the Council itself to house its Heritage team who are to be moved out of Cliftonville House. We also informed the committee that the Council had not followed published guidance from the government or English Heritage over the sale of listed buildings and that grants could be available for either the council or the Friends of Abington Park and or others who wanted to find a future public use for the properties.

As evidence of the above we presented information gleaned from a Freedom of Information request submitted by Jean which threw up some startling revelations. For instance we discovered that in October 2009 Phil Houston, the Youth Development Director for NAYC had made an approach to the Council about using the cottages for a "Youth drop in project" for local 13 - 19 yr olds. This idea was described as "a good potential use" by Cllr Andrew Simpson Lib Dem PPC for Northampton North in an emailed response copied into the portfolio holder Cllr David Perkins, but 'Perky' was having none of it. In a direction to officers dealing with the property he made the administrations position crystal clear when he wrote:

" We will only consider offers which releases capital back to NBC. I am sure that you will be aware that we are trying to establish a war chest of funds from the sale of non priority assets to assist us to manage our organisational change programme"

Despite the above evidence the call in committee decided that the decision to sell should stand and that our claim of a pre determined outcome was irrelevant.

The Borough Solicitor and Cllr Perkins summed up beautifully by telling us that there is nothing wrong at all about the administration on the Council having a set policy to sell assets and only consider options that they wish to consider, equally it was for others to come up with plans and apply for grants if they wanted to maintain the cottages in public hands, but of course following Cllr Perkins email we the public as owners of the cottages would have to buy them back from ourselves (or in this case the Council that is supposed to be looking after them for us) at the going rate in order that a capital receipt went back into the Lib Dem's said war chest.

And what is the "organisational change programme" which will be funded by this windfall? Well to you and me this means that the Council is building up a pot of money to fund the redundancy costs of staff put out of work as even more services are cut in future months.

So their we have it, all out in the open, Northampton Liberal Democrats champions of private market solutions and offloading valuable public assets in order to fund cuts in staff numbers, and all in their own words not ours.

The cottages will now be advertised and probably sold on at a knock down price because of the full cost of repairing years of neglect by the Council who where supposed to be custodians of Lady Wantage's gifted estate.

Doesn't it make you proud of our council? Lady Wantage will of course certainly be turning in her resting place, even the Tory grandees in charge of the Council when she made her gift were far more Liberal than this lot.