Transcript of Richard Eley’s Speech at the Sid Vale Association Meeting at the Unitarian Church, 9th December 2014

(Richard Eley was speaking about Richard Cohen’s figures for relocation costs.)

“The numbers are completely, hopelessly and scandalously wrong. They are useless, they are terrible and have to be challenged vigorously and strenuously. These numbers are rubbish. They don’t include the green travel plan, they don’t include compensation for the staff, they don’t include the cost of the move itself, they don’t include the costs of hubs the other towns and, most importantly, they don’t include the cost of officer time and members time that is involved in all of this.

The expert, Mr Steve Pratten from Davis Langdon, he is going to cost £1million or more on his own. It doesn’t include the legal costs in all this. I say to the District Council that I have estimated the real costs to be £20 million. That figure was not disputed – Richard Cohen did not say it was exaggerated – he said he didn’t recognize the number. What that means is that I was bang on the money.

Ladies and gentlemen, we are trusting Richard Cohen to mastermind this whole process and we are assuming that he’s accurate in the mathematical calculations. This is the same man who measured the Knowle 40% smaller than it turned out to be! He got it wrong by 40%. Robin Fuller had to write a paper, he was rubbished in the press and it turned out that he was correct. The Knowle is 40% bigger than Richard Cohen thought it was.

This is the same man who was responsible for four attempts to compose the economic impact assessments rejected by his own planning committee. He can’t get simple mathematics right. This same man tells us that energy prices are going to go ahead for the next 20 years at 10% over inflation. He is alone in the entire world in thinking this. Nobody else believes that including your energy companies who will fix your energy costs for the next four years. That instantly takes £1.5million out of all the savings that are supposed to be made by moving, so he hasn’t even bothered to explore that possibility.

He is also the man who shifted the southern boundary of the Knowle to include the second tier of parkland without telling anybody and in contradiction to the specific instructions of the Development Management Committee. I was told this would not be investigated because the Inspector would look at it, which he would not do because it was not in his remit. So that has never been investigated by anybody at the Knowle.”

“He did it without managing to record that process; without managing to record any conversation with any individual, without writing a single email, or keeping a single note or sending any kind of correspondence to any third party. Because I made a freedom of information request, and there was nothing there.”

“He did it unilaterally, on his own, secretly, and he didn’t tell a single soul, and I only found out by accident.”

This is not the kind of person I would trust to do these calculations. Now when he says it is going to cost £15.9million to refurbish the Knowle, I would tell him that that’s a load of bunkum. This relates to the entire building, which nobody advocates retaining. Why is anybody working in a bathroom when the Knowle is two and a half times the size of the building EDDC says it needs? How can that be possible? Mr Cohen in his calculations also asserts that there is nil chance, not 1% chance of local government reform in the next 20 years.

Anybody who listened to the Autumn Statement knows that local government reform is highly likely and as John Dyson correctly said there is an 80% chance that EDDC will not exist in 5 years time, so the chances of us recovering all these millions over the next 20 years is much reduced.

Finally, he assumes that over the course of those 20 years with energy now costing astronomical amounts of money the average domestic bill according to Richard Cohen would be 30% of your income in energy costs. He assumes that the government, EDDC and none of the people working there will make any effort whatsoever to reduce the costs of energy in that time. They won’t switch off any lights, they won’t turn off any central heating and they will continue to occupy every single bathroom throughout that period despite the fact that there is going to be 140 less people working there, assuming they don’t go to Exmouth.”