Council expenditure is at best obscure, some would say obfuscated. There is no easy way of finding out how our money is spent and whether it represents value or even necessity.

Public money, spent on our behalf, should be open to the highest scrutiny, especially when a Council has so little official opposition.

So it comes as something of a relief to find that public tender records are available, not through the Council, but through central government records. These take some untangling but we know now some of the expenditure on this project.

APPENDIX 1 – INITIAL BUSINESS CASE

Table 1: Capital Business Case Details

Costs: Land / Capital receipt replacement £1,250,000
Build costs £3,373,000
Prelim, overheads & profits £610,000
Design & project fees £340,000
– 10% £432,000

Total: £6,005,000

Funded by:

Service saving supported borrowing £3,758,000
Rent Supported borrowing £1,204,000
Homes England grant funding £1,040,000
Corporate supported borrowing (Project Initiation) £3,000

Total: £6,005,000

All development cost information provided by Atkins’s cost engineers.
Rent supported borrowing calculated using residual of social rent residual following 30%
deduction for management, maintenance, void & bad debts (MMVBD) and borrowing
rate/term of 3.5%/40years.
Home England funding uses typical grant rates.
Work undertaken by the Adults Team has identified a potential annual saving of between 10-
12% (£176k – £209k) on package care costs if 16 care packages were to be
delivered/commissioned directly. This has potential to support capital borrowing of between
£3.8m-£4.5m based on 3.5%/40years.
The property is part of the capital receipts target which reduce overall borrowing to the
capital programme. The budgeted figure for 2022-23 was £1,250K and represents an
opportunity cost of progressing with the scheme.
Service supported borrowing not available until savings/income materialise. For 22/23 will
use Affordable Housing Provisional Allocation, with repayment on completion.
The site has £742k of capital charges set against past development work. These are funded
by capital receipts and not included in the above table which focuses on future costs.

To recap, from Council minutes,  the overall cost of the Supported Housing Scheme is put at £6.005M, from estimates provided by Atkins. Atkins were not successful in the next stage of bidding, being replaced by Arcadis Consulting (UK) Ltd  (Company No: 2212959 ), Officers indicating that the Atkins bid was substantially more expensive than anticipated.

The recent hydrogeology investigation was costed at £80,000 ( it is worth remembering that previously commissioned hydrogeology reports are mysteriously ‘missing’ from Council records), this link describes the contract.  Bizarrely, the Atkins Ltd  company (Company number 00688424) now renamed as AtkinsRealis UK Ltd, is a member of a huge multi-national but is registered as a SME, thus conferring preferred status for some contracts.

The contract for development to Planning application stage is worth £187,250.75, and was awarded by Homes England on behalf of BANES.

There is now a dedicated page for this information on this site, available here.