Quote:
Originally Posted by andrewb
I assume it is national thing simply because of the huge cost. I don't think it's fair to blame just the council for the waste of money though. All the funding came directly from the office of the deputy PM, the single regeneration budget and the European regional development fund. They requested that Hyndburn council have the site, and offered the cash.
The most shocking thing is this:
"The Portal was to be a project that broke new grounds in IT, but unfortunately rapidly developing technologies such as Ebay, Amazon, Facebook etc. made it obsolete almost at the point that it was launched."
Sites like Ebay, Amazon, that already existed before the project was embarked on! Quite how Hyndburnlife sought to replicate those sites, I don't know...
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The council votes on how money is spent so stating that it's not really their fault because it was given to them is a very, very poor excuse. It's the equivalent of a sickly child throwing away £25 on sweets and then blaming their parents for giving them birthday money.
I know that the Hyndburn Labour party budget meetings contained lengthy debates about the best way of spending money and sums that were many orders of magnitude less than £591k were very closely scrutinised. Surely the same principle should be applied by those in power when spending public money?
Just because you have it doesn't mean you have to blow it in a cavalier fashion.