January 25th, 2012

There are financial and other matters which weren’t reported to the Council’s Cabinet which may be of interest to Crawley residents.

1. This project has never been scrutinised by the Overview & Scrutiny committee, for value for money.

2. The terms of the Lottery grant are that the Council will have to achieve Green Flag status for Worth Park for the first six years, or some of the grant could be clawed back.

3. The Council will have to commit to a 10 year maintenance programme.

4, The Council acknowledges that there is a medium risk of an overspend on this project. If this happens, the cost will have to be met in full by the Council. The Lottery will not make any extra contribution.

6. In addition to £1000,000 capital contribution, the Council has also committed to an additional £100,000 extra maintenance expenditure for the first five years.This at a time when the Council is looking to spend less on the Leisure budget as a whole, including Tilgate Park.

7. The Council will take staff who maintain Crawley’s other parks to support this project, so those parks could suffer from less maintenance.

8. The financial scrutiny of the project will be overseen by a committee comprised of local groups, not the Council itself. Therefore, this project will be considered in isolation from other Council priorities.

9. Despite the claim that this is a town wide project, there has been no attempt at cross party working, as there usually is with major Council projects. This project has been the exclusive property of the Tory group.

Most of this is taken from the application to the Heritage Lottery Fund, the HLF terms of grant & the Worth Park Activity Plan, all available on request from the Council.

In addition the Activity Plan states that ‘Worth Park’s unique Victorian features tell a story of the roots of Crawley. The ambition of the project is to build a sense of pride, involvement & celebration this shared heritage across Crawley, which runs deeper than the more visible postwar heritage which is prevalent in the town’

Is the Victorian heritage which the Council plans to celebrate the Downton Abbeysque view of the 19th century, or will it also be the exploitation of children and the slave trade which enabled vast country estates to be built, together with the wealth stolen from other countries by British colonialism, and the way that so many unfortunates, including some who had worked at Worth Park/Milton Mount ended their days in misery at the Worth workhouse, a mile away on the Turners Hill Road.

If Victorian society has to be ‘celebrated’, that celebration should be tempered with the warts of the era, which led eventually to the creation of the welfare state, of which the New Towns movement was a part.

Finally, thank you if you have read this far, the last point is that much of the ‘history’ which has been used to support this project is completely unsourced & therefore highly dubious.

Councillor Ian Irvine

Broadfield North, Labour