In a Facebook post last night, Deputy Leader of the Council Thomas Jay has broken the silence on the full demolition of a historic building on Market Street.
So an admission that ‘comms were slow’, when in fact they were nonexistent. Councillor Danny Cook pointed this out on Councillor Jays’ post and swiftly got deleted for his trouble. Updated: The comment is actually still there on the original post.
To Debunking, this statement still smacks of no-one actually knowing what was going on until it happened. The Council’s ‘process’ on this was nothing to do with Comms and apparently more to do with hiding the fact they were demolishing the entire building by making it a ‘delegated decision’ of officers to do so. So did officers of our Council just decide to go ahead and remove the building, or did someone higher up give the OK hoping no one would make a fuss about it. Either way, it’s backfired. There’s also evidence in plain sight on the Council’s planning portal suggesting this was a rush job with pressure being put on:
We at Debunking would suggest that it’s a bit late changing processes now when the deed has already conveniently been done, any application for demolition of a historic building should have by default gone to a ‘public facing planning committee’. Someone put the pressure on, someone gave the green light to this, someone thought it best not to tell the public directly and tried to bury it in the noise of an election period instead.
Assuming that person is Councillor Paul Turner, (who has not got a direct quote in this statement and appears to be letting his deputy take the punches) given his inability to control the Council, and failure to deliver on his promises to improve communication amid his fanfare, leading to the worst possible outcome for our heritage, we call on him to resign.
