Saturday 12th October 2024,
North Yorks Enquirer

The Missing £210,000 Website

In April 2017, the Enquirer published an article about the £2.8million renovation of the Scarborough Market Hall.

The collective brains of the imbeciles business geniuses working for Scarborough Borough Council (SBC) thought it wise to invest £2.8million of taxpayer’s money from the Coastal Communities Fund into renovating the Scarborough Market Hall on St Helen’s Square.

The barking mad stunningly brilliant business plan, two years in the making, was to invest £2.8million to raise £1.1million in rents from the market’s existing traders and new premises on the additional mezzanine floor.

A year after it reopened long term traders are leaving the Market Hall in droves due to large rent increases, rumours abound there won’t be any extra revenue and the council’s business plan appears to be in ruins.

Part of the £2.8million renovation plan was to create a website for the newly refurbished Market Hall, which would give traders a digital presence and an e-commerce platform to increase their revenue.

The website was commissioned at a cost of £210k and was due to go live in June 2016. Twenty Two months later the website is nowhere to be seen. There is still no launch date on SBC’s website and there is no explanation from SBC why the website is so late.

Unfortunately the investigative ability of the gormless assiduous councillors has not yet managed to elicit a website launch date nor an explanation for the delays from SBC’s business geniuses.

You’d think people who are charged with looking after the public purse would be crucifying the SBC Officers over such failures. Not in Scarborough. SBC Councillors are so meek that they’ll inherit the earth one day soon.

There are SBC elections in 13 months time. Perhaps there will be a new breed of councillor who will stop the gross waste of taxpayer’s money and kindly let us know what happened to the missing £210k website.

Meanwhile, if anyone at SBC can shed any light on this state of affairs, and should they manage to get past the SBC e-mail interception system, the Enquirer will be delighted to publish their assurances.

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