Green Belt signs - tendering mystery?

Nothing is ever straightforward in the rotten Labour Borough of Sandwell (aka "Sadwell") is it? Regular readers will know that Labour want to try and make a few quid by placing huge v-shaped "Toblerone" signs on Green Belt land at Ray Hall Lane, Great Barr. To this end, the failing Council rushed through their own planning application with indecent haste, but only after mysteriously taking unspecified pre-application "advice" from advertising signage giants, J C Decaux (which will, no doubt, be expressly set-out during the alleged "tendering process" - see further below).

Our old friend of this blog, Nick Bubalo, head of planning, made the application which, despite objections, speedily passed through the planning process. One Councillor put in a petition against the scheme - when people should have properly registered formal objections instead - and SMBC simply ignored it, as per usual. The whole Council had to approve this sh*te as it involves green belt land and the sonmambulant "socialist" sheep duly obliged.

I asked SMBC on your behalf about the "tendering process" and no less a person than Bubalo himself wrote to reassure me:

"The Toblerone signs will go through the Council's appropriate formal tendering process. This is currently being worked up and will go out tender in due course".

Buy sh*t suckers!

Of course, this blog has pointed to a little local difficulty with the crafty comrades and their "tendering processes" in the past but, subject to SMBC disclosing in full the "advice" from J C Decaux (whom one would normally have expected to want to be involved in this deal) and staff not fiddling the process (and they now know they have police immunity from investigation) then at least all this appeared to be "above board". Pretty simple really - tenders to erect and maintain two large Toblerone signs at specific locations and to pay the taxpayer rent - highest bid within specification surely "takes all". But soft.....

The sleazy "socialist" Council did put up something about this with a deadline date in late February and a named contact. But anyone trying to contact the named person was met with a standard email response that he was out of the office until March ie after the deadline date! With Jan Britton's out of control staff it is hard to say whether this was done deliberately for sinister reasons or is just yet more evidence of pure incompetence.

But worse, the tender offer is NOT to erect these two signs at all but for firms to "express an interest" in doing so together with more signs at up to eight (8!) other, as yet, unspecified sites. In other words, another classic stitch-up could well be in the offing whereby the comrades chat with and snuggle up to a specifically-favoured party and lock-out all other competition. I am in communication with a Company involved in this "process" and so watch this space but there is another nasty smell coming from Ray Hall Lane and, this time, it ain't from the sewage works......

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