Hart #Covid19 funding black hole shrinks to £628K

The Government has awarded Hart more Covid19 funding that shrinks its expected deficit to from the pandemic to “only” £628K. This is welcome news as only last week the deficit stood at £1.6m.

However, £628K still represents about 6% of the council’s budget. We are left wondering which project could be cancelled to make good most of this shortfall? ?

Stopping Shapley Heath could help close Hart’s Covid19 funding gap

Hart #Covid19 funding black hole details

The council have circulated their estimate of the loss of income and extra costs they are facing as a result of the coronavirus pandemic,

Hart Council Covid19 funding hit

This amounts to over £1.6m. The Government have announced they will provide £987K of Covid19 funding to Hart.

Hampshire Councils #Covid19 funding

But this still leaves a £628K funding gap, on top of the “perfect storm” they faced in their finances even before the pandemic hit.

It will be interesting to see if this subject comes up at the “virtual” council meeting to adopt the Local Plan. The live stream can be found here.

Covid19 blows £1.6m hole in Hart finances

We do hope everyone is staying safe from the coronavirus and coping well with the lockdown. Hopefully, the disease will be brought under control soon and we can start to get back to normal. However, Covid19 has blown a big hole in Hart’s finances.

Amongst other things, we understand that Covid19 has reduced Hart’s car parking revenue by around £240K. The Council expect to lose £140K of council tax and business rates. They also expect to lose £360K from planning income and £390K from the leisure centre. Of course, they still have to pay for the leisure centre loans. They have also incurred technology and staff costs of over £200K in providing the Hart response Hub.

So far, they have received £24K from the Government to cover these costs and expect more to come, but don’t expect that it will bridge the £1.6m funding gap. They expect to have to bridge any remaining gap from reserves.

There is some good news. So far, they have distributed £6.5m under the Government’s Small Business Grant Scheme. This means that 65% of all businesses that have applied for the grant have now been paid. They expect to pay the balance by the end of April. A number of businesses have not applied for the grant. If you, or any of your friends think you might be eligible, visit Hart’s website to check eligibility and apply: https://www.hart.gov.uk/covid-19-information-for-businesses.

With most construction sites being shutdown, and one might imagine that the housing market will be subdued for some time, they will probably lose some New Homes bonus too.

All this comes on top of the “perfect storm” facing Hart’s finances that we reported on back in January. We hesitate to be political at this difficult time, but surely they must reexamine whether they should be spending  £650K on Shapley Heath Garden Village at the moment. We have shown how the project is not required. Now more than ever, it is likely housing demand is going to fall as people have less money in their pockets. The Inspector said there’s no evidence it’s viable or deliverable. It will drive up the housing target and be made irrelevant by Grazeley. Not to mention the unnecessary 1m tonnes of CO2 that will be emitted during construction. This is a white elephant project that we cannot afford.

Stay well and keep healthy everyone.

Hart Council has held the first meeting of the Shapley Heath “Opportunity” Board. It was a meeting that could be attended by the public, but they didn’t publicise it, so nobody turned up. But, the papers and the minutes have been published, so we can get a sense of what went on. Perhaps the most disturbing point is that the developers will procure and fund the production of all of the baseline studies.

As the promoters/developers with significant land interest, Lightwood Strategic and L&Q Estates, have confirmed that, subject to Board approval, they will procure and fund all of the baseline surveys.

This is putting the developer fox in charge of the Shapley Heath hen house. What could possibly go wrong? The list of baseline documents is as follows:

Shapley Heath baseline evidence

Can we really trust the developers to produce objective, impartial assessments on these issues? What sort of documents are they going  too produce, when much of this work has been done already? And much of it persuaded the Inspector to throw Shapley Heath/Policy SS3 out of the Local Plan. Winchfield Parish Council produced a lot of this evidence for the Local Plan examination. Their evidence covered flood risk, heritage assets, ecology, green infrastructure and agricultural land. It also looked at the constraints from the M3, the railway electricity pylons and the high pressure gas main. The constraints were handily summarised in a single diagram.

Figure 6 Winchfield Summary of Key Findings

The council has committed to fund a number of strategic reports:

Shapley Heath strategy reports

So far, they don’t appear to have pulled together a bottom-up estimate of the costs of these reports. But they are going to spend nearly two years producing them all.

Shapley Heath Phases and Timeline

Sloppy Financial Control

But the problems don’t stop there. It is clear that the financial control over the project is sloppy at best. Previously, they had budgeted £70K for a “full time dedicated senior post” and a part time administrator.

£70K for 1 full time and 1 part time resource

But, now they have cut the budget to £65K and hope to hire three people. If you pay peanuts, you know what you can expect.

Shapley Heath Sloppy Financial Control

They have now signed off funding for four people, when the original request was for 1.5 FTEs. Further, they are funding 3 of these full time positions from a one-off grant from Government. What happens to these people when the money runs out? We remind readers that Hart finances are facing a “perfect storm”. This is not a time to be creating unfunded liabilities. Similarly, they are paying for the project manager from part of the £500K being transferred from reserves, which again is a one-off source of funding.

This looks like a project that is out of control. The council are throwing our hard-earned money at a project that is not required, at a time when their finances are severely constrained.

Shapley Heath Secret Meeting

It has emerged that Hart Council officers have held a secret meeting about Shapley Heath with Homes England and the developers. The meeting was revealed in a late response to a question put to Graham Cockarill back in November. He didn’t turn up to the meeting, and the promised written answer has only been provided today.

No wonder he didn’t want to answer the question during the General Election campaign.

The question was put by head the head of the Conservative group on the council, Anne Crampton. The response is produced in full below.

Hart holds Shapley Heath secret meeting with developers and Homes England

It is astonishing that meetings like this are not minuted. Even more astonishing is that the developers are more involved in the process than elected councillors.

We also asked a question at the same meeting. This was about the climate change impact of building up to 10,000 unnecessary houses. Sadly, the response didn’t really answer the question. But it is clear they are doubling down on investigating Shapley Heath Garden Village.

Cockarill doubles down on Shapley Heath madness

The full minutes can be found here.