Marmion House. The big brown blot in Tamworths’ landscape, along with the flats and the former police station (which is a whole laughable story in itself). The Tories tried to kill off Marmion House, headquarters of our esteemed Borough Council, taking the opportunity of COVID to close down the reception desk there completely. Not to mention moving nearly all employees to work from home contracts.
It seems that the crumbling building is going to get a new lease of life, (or lipstick put on a pig if you like) if documents on the agenda for next week’s ‘Corporate Scrutiny‘ committee on the 5th September are anything to go by. Labour want to reopen the reception desk again at the building. Not only that but the Town Hall will be ditched for Council meetings too, because some Labour Councillors don’t like having to walk there from the Marmion House car park. This will leave the Town Hall, which we understand at one stage there had been grand plans for, left in mothballs once again to sit and do nothing. Whilst the Council Chamber at Marmion House will get a refurbishment and new audio and video equipment. This despite the relatively new equipment in the Town Hall being adequate (not including the naff efforts at streaming meetings). What an amazing use of Tax Payers money.
We do wonder how long before the staff are dragged kicking and screaming from the comfort of their homes so their overlords can keep a better eye on them? Not long we think. Let’s hope they enjoy the freezing cold windows that need replacing with the heating up full blast.
Despite protestation from the Tories that there was indeed a cost effective reception desk available at the Assembly Rooms, Labour and one particular Independent councillor continually stirred the pot to try and make out there was no such thing. This swiftly moved to the facility there being branded inadequate, despite between this and home visits to residents, the service had indeed improved. The only grumbling about the reception desk relocation appeared to be from people on Facebook who had never, and in fact had no need to visit it in the first place. It’s always fun when people with zero insight make judgements.
So it seems those people have won the day, because Labour like to make it look like they are listening. In fact they’ve not got the cahonies to make the difficult decisions and like to play up to populism. After they lied through their teeth during the elections, they’ve got to have something easy to show for it, even if it is a waste of money. Their Government colleagues however, are actually currently taking the opportunity to stick their middle fingers up at pretty much everyone including quite literally your gran to raise the cash to splurge on who knows what (Five years everyone, please do enjoy!).
So what is wrong with Marmion House then? Well, since it was going to be demolished, pretty much everything. Having been built as a hotel in the last century (oh please, we know our readership already feel old) the building is the worse for wear, needing new windows as mentioned… Well, everything, which was estimated to cost a fortune with savings of £3.5 million estimated in not having to run and maintain the place. Now Labour are going to have to find that cash for all these plans from somewhere, let’s take a guess, large council tax raises and dismembered services perhaps. It’s not their best move, but they don’t have to worry about that, as it’s your money not theirs. If they plan to do all of this, this year, the Tory budget will be ripped to shreds and something else will have to give.
On a side note. We did also hear from our sources that there was going to be some difficulty in disposing of Marmion House due to the former leader Danny Cook and officers letting a renewal of a lease for mobile phone equipment on the roof slip by. Oops. Although we can imagine that would not be an insurmountable problem given the savings.
This table represents the costs of just the reception desk opening, completely ignoring the cost of keeping the building up to scratch from what we can see. Presented as ‘revenue costed’ for some strange reason as if it will bring in any. The price for staffing also seems deceptively low, given they usually have a security guard there during opening hours. We don’t think all of this literally adds up from our uneducated first glance. At very worst case, they reckon it’s going to cost 92k per year just to keep a handful of people who use the desk happy.
They reckon they’re going to get 200 people a week through the door which is what the costs below are based on, despite their own report stating they get on average 44 enquiries per month at the Assembly Rooms.
Quite astonishing how they think they can fudge the figures, and we are pretty sure we’ve not read the report wrong, we actually hope we have!
We are sure all of this will be opposed by the Tories in the meeting on the night, but ultimately as usual it won’t be anyone in that meeting making a decision on it. That will of course come down to the Labour Cabinet, who will no doubt wave it through, having noted that the plans have been well ‘scrutinised’. So we are back to the good old days of the socialists wasting your money and simultaneously squeezing more out of you, what a time to be alive dear reader!
