Published at 11:11, Thursday, 03 May 2012

THE time may well have come to pull the plug altogether on Pow Beck community sports stadium. Can this tortuous and expensive project move ahead with any degree of public confidence or credibility?

Mismanagement, incompetence, scandal – call it what you will, in the eyes of the general public the collapse of the Pow Beck scheme with the loss of World Cup matches is a disgrace.

Where is the confidence and the expertise to still go down an alternative Pow Beck route?

There is a risk of throwing good money after bad. The announcement that the scheme was no longer affordable or viable in its present form, combined with the loss of World Cup fixtures, makes the borough a laughing stock.

Are there better ways of investing at least £5.5 million (of what is essentially public money) through Britain’s Energy Coast?

Some £1.2 million of ‘nuclear cash’ has virtually been wasted already.

Last week the scheme came to a sensational and a shameful end and the stadium partners are looking for another Pow Beck access route which may or may not prove cost-effective.

We think our readers should tell us how best they would like to see those millions spent.

Would you still like to see a stadium built on Pow Beck? Or somewhere else (such as Cumbria Centre of Sporting Excellence – alias Copeland Stadium, Hensingham)? Or would you rather see it spent on some other community scheme worthy of consideration elsewhere in a borough? Use it or lose it indeed.

So much political posturing has gone on behind the scenes over the rights and wrongs of the negotiations with Whitehaven Miners’ Social Welfare over the use of access land.

We support the calls for an independent inquiry (open to the press and the public) to examine what has gone wrong.

So much appears to have been done (and hidden) under a cloak of secrecy and, of late, a confidentiality agreement between the Partnership and the Miners’ organisation.

It is inconceivable that Pow Beck should get so far without a proper business plan.

MP Jamie Reed describes the situation as humiliating. He believes the stadium will still happen but declares: “I believe all partners involved have to look at themselves and admit why this went wrong and ensure it doesn’t happen again.”

No one wants a witch hunt but should heads roll? The buck has to stop somewhere, usually at the top and in this case Copeland Council, while not actually putting any money into the scheme, is the accountable body whose officers and some Executive councillors have led the way on an aborted project.

But clearly Jamie Reed does not restrict his criticism to the council alone. He is not alone in this.

Was the opportunity not there for members of the Britain’s Energy Coast board and Nuclear Management Partners to exercise a greater control and even to call a halt if not satisfied? NMP’s stated view is that it chose to leave how to spend the money to the community itself, but in reality those decisions are made from the top down. We’ve been left a hostage to fortune.

It is important for local community leaders and our nuclear benefactors to establish a harmonious working relationship, but in this instance we have to ask whether there has been too much political influence – and interference. The plug ought to have been pulled much earlier, despite the amount of egg left on faces.

Credibility and public confidence has to be restored – a public inquiry may well be the best way forward.

Published by http://www.whitehavennews.co.uk