The disastrous balls-up that remains Station Road in Dumbarton. Pictures by Bill Heaney
I had a call this week from a guy who appears to have a special interest in West Dunbartonshire Council’s proposal to spend £8.5 million on converting Glencairn House in Dumbarton High Street into a library and museum.
The man told me that he was having a terrible time trying at community council meetings to extract answers from West Dunbartonshire councillors and others about this proposal, especially since Dumbarton has a perfectly good public library, fit for purpose, in Strathleven Place.
He had shaken the council communications tree on a number of occasions and no monkeys had fallen out, which went a long way to persuading him that there was something fishy about the whole business.
West Dunbartonshire Council was not as open and transparent as a public authority should be and which some of the councillors and national politicians had actually vowed publicly that they would be.
The electorate in Dumbarton have read much about the library plan now, but it never got a mention at the outset. Secret Scotland found easy access in Dumbarton while the press and public were kept at arms length. It costs around £500,000 a year to stage this comedy or errors.
This soap opera was being paid for by a multi-billion pound slush fund designed to boost levelling up and replace crucial EU funding, but was being left unspent by the vast majority of councils, including West Dunbartonshire.
The local council was awarded £20 million from the fund and has hardly spent any of it – apart from the Atlas boulders project which they claim enhances the streetscape outside Dumbarton Central Station in Station Road.
That monstrosity cost around £30,000, so almost all of the £20 million given to us is sitting there waiting for the council to come up with an acceptable plan to improve the town centre.
Good ideas and forward thinking are in short supply at our very own Fawlty Towers in Church Street.
The boulders didn’t cut it with the public who have written hundreds of letters of criticism and had a torrent of well-founded complaints published on social media.
I have been trawling around looking for answers to this man’s questions, but the Council refuse to enlighten me. They’re still in the huff.
They spend more time and more money on staff taking complaints about uncollected bins and potholes in the roads than they do on communications even though they were said to be so busy on public relations matters that they couldn’t cope with questions from a journalist such as I.
The main reasons why this cack-handed approach to levelling up matters here and why there has been a significant underspend in the shared prosperity fund were money being handed over too late to spend, a lengthy and bureaucratic process and a hollowing-out of council expertise.
The fund, a central pillar of the government’s efforts to boost the most deprived areas of the UK, is designed to provide £2.6 billion by 2025. Ministers said it would “reduce the levels of bureaucracy and funding spent on administration when compared with EU funds” and “enable truly local decision making”.
However, data uncovered using the Freedom of Information Act reveals that 95% of the local authorities that received funding in 2022-23 were unable to spend all of their share.
Across the UK, 43% of £429m in funding was not spent. Not a single council in the north of England, Scotland or Wales spent its full investment.
West Dunbartonshire would have to have been one of them. Take the boulders cash and the rainbow coloured tarmacadamed roadway in Station Road money and you have hardly taken a nibble out of the £20 million.
Add the few pounds of the fortress-like reception doors and gateways and printing tickets to keep the press public out of council meetings, which they did again at this year’s budget meeting and you’re still talking peanuts.
Yet West Dunbartonshire Council claims endlessly that they don’t get enough from Westminster when the facts are that they haven’t the acumen or the capacity to spend the money, such as the levelling up fund, that they do receive from London at the moment.
The findings will raise questions over what was first described as streamlining funding and handing power to communities in the way ministers promised when the fund was launched last year.
The unspent money has been rolled over into this financial year which is, of course, a General Election year and there is a “big risk” of the mistakes simply being repeated.
I’ll tell that guy who phoned me that he needn’t worry himself about that £8.5 million for a library in Glencairn House. That will never see the light of day.
West Dunbartonshire will be one of those authorities who are almost certain to still have all this money in the bank and, with significant underspends because they haven’t an idea of what to do with it, are likely to receive even more levelling up money.
One finance expert told me: “The issue is not the size of the funding pot per se, but the rules attached to it and the failure to produce ideas for projects and get the work done on time.
“Councils will most probably now have to spend nearly three times more than they were able to allocate in 2022-23 – which raises questions about their capacity and capability to do so, given the reductions in staffing in recent years.