Dear Emily
I have read most of your article that was, indeed is, so necessary and, indeed essential. My concerns surround the WMCA and the auditing by Grant Thornton's Grant Patterson, if I have the name right. He reported back to the Audit, Risk and Assurance Committee of the WMCA on Monday of this week.
On Monday, WMCA's Helen Edwards was unable to be present but she wrote this to me, today:
"My role is to ensure good governance and safe decision making processes." Helen Edwards, Director of Law and Governance, 25 January 2023
Is what I am about to write, here good governance and safe decision making, Emily?
May I ask you:
Are auditors meant to check, challenge, question?
Do auditors promote wise spending by their clients?
Is prudence and sensible, careful spending at the heart of all that you do? Obviously so!
Is audit meant to flag up concerns and certainly irresponsible, wasteful spending of taxpayers' money? For example, 40 years of converting two mainline railways to trams and two and a quarter mainline stations destroyed. Is this good governance and safe decision making? No one in Overview and Scrutiny Committee or in Audit, Risk and Assurance Committee ever expresses any concern over this state of affairs. It is always business as usual. What has always been done must continue to be done.
MORE DETAIL
The scandal I have exposed is the obvious destruction of two mainline railways and two and a quarter mainline stations for unnecessary "bus on rails" Metro trams. I think this is wrong, foolish and incompetent. Especially, when 106 Kms of double track mainline railways in our region are still without passenger trains and stations! Is this wrong doing, negligence and the most weird and wonderful, truly eccentric priorities that simply accelerate the climate emergency and failing life support systems?
This has gone on since 1981, too. Actually, it is 70 years of tram and train destruction in the W Midlands. And, it continues to this day with the Dudley Tram (Wednesbury, Brierley Hill, Extension (WBHE Phase 2) wrecking Nature, the only public open space at Merry Hill, wasted housing land and my guerrilla garden, also at the shopping centre. WBHE Phase 1 opens at the end of 2024 from Wednesbury to Dudley bus station. This really is a totally unnecessary spending of billions of pounds to speed climate breakdown and the exhaustion of finite resources.
But what do you think, Emily? Have I got something wrong here?
25 January 2023
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