Britain's worst built school to be demolished!

 

Russell Scott School Denton

Government in the UK is said to be government by amateurs. This also applies to local authorities like Tameside Council, a local authority in Greater Manchester. During 2013-15, the council spent £2.7 million on the botched refurbishment by Carillion of the Russell Scott school in Denton. Now the school will have to be demolished and rebuilt.

Who, I wonder, was the buffoon at Tameside Council who signed this job off? Carillion had preferred bidder status within Tameside Council and was a "joint venture partner"' under the Building Schools for the Future project. In 2011, The council transferred all its facilities management to Carillion and the construction giant was contracted to build Tameside One, before it went bust in January 2018, almost taking the council with it. It was also contracted to provide school meals in the borough that turned out to be more costly than the money allocated by the government for each school meal. Tameside schools were made to pay the difference from their own budgets.

One of the people who didn't live long enough to see the demise of Carillion, was the Tameside Council Labour leader, and former postman, Kieran Quinn, who died suddenly on 23 December 2017, of a heart attack, aged 57, five months after Carillion issued a first profit warning in July 2017. Although Quinn didn't work for Carillion, he was one of the firms biggest promoters in spite of the companies dodgy history and its reputation for blacklisting union construction workers. It's known that many of the deals that were done by Carillion and Tameside Council, were done behind closed doors and only involved a small number of people.

John Bell, the Tory leader of the council at the time of Carillion's collapse, complained of a lack of scrutiny that made it difficult to know if Carillion was delivering efficiently or providing value for money. The same questions had been asked by the journalist, Nigel Pivaro, in the Tameside Reporter in August 2017. Pivaro asked if Tameside Council had put too many of its eggs in one basket in its relationship with Carillion, a company that it depended on, far too much. He referred to the problems at Russel Scott, Carillion's plummeting share price and its huge pension deficit. He posed the question that if Carillion went bust, could it take the council with it?

Although what has happened at Russell Scott is an absolute scandal, no one within Tameside Council, to my knowledge, seems to have been held accountable for this complete balls up. Indeed, many local contractors lost money by doing business with Carillion and Tameside Council incurred massive debts, yet no heads have ever rolled within the council nor did anyone finish up being prosecuted.

As far as Keiran Quinn is concerned, at the time of his death, he was hailed as a visionary, who had, according to the council's CEO, Steven Pleasant, a "brilliant, strategic and perceptive mind..." The day after it was announced that Carillion had gone bump, and that work had stopped on the Tameside One project, the council announced that it was "Business As Usual."