One of the most staggering moments of last Thursday’s full meeting of the County Council was when Ken Thornber announced that he intended to go ahead with the transfer of the Tower Arts Centre to King School without a business plan.
He explained that he would not be looking for a ‘business plan’ from Kings School for the Tower Arts Centre – but rather a ‘business case’. And then, to the amazement of most of the Councillors who attended the Hampshire Action Team (HAT) meeting on November 8, 2007 to review the current proposed plan, he went on to say that the presentation made at that meeting counted, in his view, as a ‘business case’.
Except that there was no serious “business case†presented to the Hampshire Action Team committee for Winchester.
So either Ken has been misinformed. Or he intends to transfer the Tower to Kings School without any proper evaluation.
Given the way the original proposal was put together, I strongly suspect the latter.
It looks like it’s going to be another rush job.
It’s ironic is that the Conservative administration on the County Council got into such a mess in the first place because they did a half-baked slap-dash incompetent job with the original Tower Arts proposal back in July. It was such a dire proposal that even Ken Thornber realised at the time that he couldn’t go ahead with it. The Conservatives have since been forced to admit publicly that several of the claims in it were false.
That’s why it’s so amazing that Ken appears to be playing around with words so that he can go ahead with the same type of rush job again.
Is it really so difficult to ask for a basic level of professionalism with a proper evaluation of costs, timings, risks and a clear picture of what will be done by the school after transfer before the decision is made?
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