Thanet Council’s all powerful, Labour controlled, Cabinet will decide on Thursday 14 March whether to purchase the Glendevon Guest House on Turo Road, Ramsgate for £650,000 plus a further £45,000 costs to covert the property into eight self-contained flats to house individuals and families who are in urgent housing need.
This is an excellent proposal. In fact TDC should purchase a lot more property to accommodate people in urgent housing need. The council should also be building hundreds, if not thousands, of low rent council houses on brown field sites powered by solar electric and kept warm by high standard insulation and efficient heat pumps.
But, when it comes to spending public money all procurement processes, including the acquisition of desperately needed social housing, must be scrupulously transparent and able to demonstrate that tax payers cash has been spent wisely.
In the case of the Glendevon Guest Hosue this does not appear to be the case. One of the current owners of the Glendevon, Rebekah Smith, is a long-time employee of Ramsgate Town Council (RTC) where she has worked as the town promoter for over eight years. Along with her partner she purchased the Glendevon hotel in 2006 for £340,000.
Unbelievably, when consulted by Thanet Council on 7th September 2023 about a planning application to change the Glendevon into a House of Multiple Occupation (HMO), neither Ramsgate Town Council’s clerk, its chairman Cllr Steve Albon, or any other of its elected councillors, all of whom must have known that their employee Rebekah Smith owned the property, thought to call in the application for further consideration.
Nor, to the best of my knowledge did any of them seek advice from TDCs Monitoring Officer about how best to manage what was and remains a potential conflict of interest.
To my surprise the report recommending the purchase of the Glendevon which will be discussed by a meeting of Thanet Council’s Cabinet on 14th March, makes no mention of the fact that the property belongs to someone whose salary is being paid for from the council Tax.
Nor, in a highly sensitive situation such as this, does the report mention whether the council offer of £650,000 to buy the property has been based upon several independent valuations.
I am not suggesting for a moment that Ms Smith, or anyone else, is misbehaving or acting unlawfully. What I am saying is that where public money is involved and where the beneficiary of the sale is a employee of the purchaser, there must be a clear and transparent audit trail to demonstrate that best value for the taxpayer has been achieved.
Even though there may genuinely be nothing to see here the advice is, and always has been, if a process appears to be conflicted or able to be manipulated or exploited for financial or any other gain, it is always best to over declare than under declare any concerns.
But of course this is TDC and RTC where the normal rules of honesty, integrity and probity don’t apply.
Remember just 2 short years ago TDC was ruthlessly criticized by its external auditor and an independent investigator for overseeing some of the worst governance arrangements in the country.
It seems to me that some RTC and TDC have demonstrated once again that they learned nothing from the past.
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