If this was your own house and you needed some work doing, you’d draw up a specification.
The driveway needs fixing, the garden, the kitchen, whatever. You’d get quotes from a number of different builders. You’d talk to them about what they would do. You’d accept one of those quotes.
Then you’d expect the builders to get on and do the work, as you’ve agreed and as you’ve contracted them to do.
You don’t expect the builders to come in and say “Ooh sorry love. We’ve found water pipes underneath the sink”!
Hello, there are utilities pipes in the high street. It’s not rocket science.
“Oh! We have to really increase the quote what we gave you now. Because we only actually pay the minimum wage. £12 or so per hour to the people that we’re paying to work on your house. And it’s really gone up so much that we have to massively increase the quote that we gave you.”
You just wouldn’t accept it – if it was your house and your money.
Well, it is our house and it is our money. It’s public realm. It’s a public street. It’s public money.
We welcome the internal audit investigation into: What has gone wrong here? What are the lessons to be learned?
We welcome the regeneration review. There’s more than one mistake or error of judgement that has gone on here.
There are multiple things that have gone wrong for the £12 million estimated overspend to be this much.
For more than double the amount of time.
We were promised last Christmas. We’re promised next Christmas now. Which year, which century even, is it going to be finished?
People are fed up of tripping over the pavement in Birkenhead town centre. They want the work finished. They want the contractors out.
We want the high street usable by businesses, customers and everybody who needs to be using our public realm.
Birkenhead town centre, the state of it. It used to be really good and we can make it good again.
But not with the **** show that we have with this council at the moment.