It's Not Cricket in Smethwick + Press Office Update

Normally you have to apply for planning permission before you get to the erection stage ;-) but bent Labour Sandwell Council are always willing to bend over backwards to help you if you have broken the law - provided that you have the "right", or rather "left" connections (remember Inane Elaine Costigan and KTC Edibles - Skidder passim?)

Thus Smethwick Cricket Club (whoever "they" actually are) thought "f*ck Sandwell" and built a two-storey extension at Broomfield in Smethwick allegedly "to support the general office and the sale of tickets" on the ground floor and a "consultation and treatment room" for injured cricketers who are able to stagger up to the, er, second floor.

In 2020 planning permission had been granted for a single storey extension but the applicant, Jasbir Singh Takhar, simply went ahead and built this instead:

There is a dearth of publicly-available records about any involvement of the bent Council in all this but Takhar applied for retrospective permission and Tony McGovern, Director of Regeneration and Growth, granted it without any further ado on 1st June, 2022. You see folks, it's as easy as that in Sadders ...

But soft I hear you say, that can't be the whole story can it Skidder? Indeed it is not.

Firstly, McGovern states in the planning permission that a valid application had been received on "5th April, 2022" whereas the SMBC website specifically dates the application as "5th May, 2022". Indeed the later seems right since the declaration on the Planning Application is dated both 3rd May and 4th May, 2022. A document was submitted in early April (see below) but was replaced in May with subtle alterations. McGovern seems to have taken this as the date of the planning application which begs the question, why? And what discussions were going on behind the scenes?

Mr Takhar forgot to mention in his application his close relationship with lying Labour Councillor, Parbinder Kaur (recent posts passim and see Legal Notice below). Yes - it's her again!

Back in October, 2021 - long before the Planning Application - The Wolvo "C***suckers (aka The Express and Star") boasted that yet another foodbank had been opened in Sandwell to relieve the poverty created by 48 years of Labour failure. Some of the "volunteers" were pictured including the Liar Kaur and Mr Takhar. Inevitably, given that Sandwell Police (right to the top) are massive rimmers of Kaur - a senior cop attended the opening. And the address? Smethwick Cricket Club!

Incidentally, Sandwell Cops were actually lining up with The Liar to have their photo taken with her at the Baton Relay. WTF????? The ID badges are obscured but the one collar number can be made out on the real officer. I wonder if this lot are from Smethwick and what their game was? (This was my photo but a Council employee took shots of them all lined up together with The Liar.)

The Wolvo C's reported that The Liar had helped set the foodbank up at Smethwick Cricket Club and that it has been set up by "Sikh women as part of the Everyone Prosper SDB Charity". But, for unknown reasons, this Charity was kicked out and a new one set up on 12th April, 2022 to run a foodbank and "wellbeing centre" (perhaps from a two storey building with an upstairs treatment room for cricketers?) There are just three trustees of "United Hands Foodbank Wellbeing Hub CIO", Alan Rudge, and guess who the other two are - yes, Jasbir Singh Takhar and Cllr Parbinder Kaur!

Happily the date of the Application as cited by McGovern pre-dates the date of Takhar and the Liar setting up the Charity so that it could be "claimed" there was no legal connection between the pair when the planning application was made. How very convenient! Perhaps a planning application is live once people "say" they will put in an application at a later date? Indeed a Design and Access Statement was put in in early April but there was clearly some discussion about this since it was amended and re-dated the day before the May Planning Application. What the hell was going on here? What was McGovern's personal role in this - if any?

And it now appears that in McGovern's new empire planning applicants don't need to mention close association with Labour Councillors - even in respect of a property where the Councillor has a direct interest!

And as the Cricket Club was already being used as a foodbank why was this not mentioned in the retrospective planning application? Is the foodbank being operated from the Pavilion or from this building? Is planning permission required for this use? Over to you Mr McG!

Oh, and I forgot to mention - Kerrie "Dim Kez" Carmichael, the leader [sic] of the bent Labour Council thinks the Liar, Parbinder Kaur, already found to have breached the Councillors Code of Conduct, is a fit and proper person to be - wait for it, wait for it - Vice Chair of the Planning Committee! WTF in triplicate????

Petition

The comrades a running a Consultation exercise regarding elections. Instead of having annual elections in 3 out of every four years they would have a single election to elect the whole council every four years. But the Consultation does not ask the public about reducing the huge number of councillors (many of whom fo f all) from 3 per ward to two. Please sign this petition IF YOU LIVE IN SANDWELL to reduce this bloated and corrupted body:

https://www.change.org/p/reduce-sandwell-council-from-72-to-48-seats

Press Office - How Sadders Doesn't Work!

Back in April, I wrote about the truly pathetic productivity rates of the overpaid staff in bent Labour Sandwell Council's press office:

https://thesandwellskidder.blogspot.com/2022/04/huge-costs-increase-for-sandwell-labour.html

A Freedom of Information (FOI) Request showed that the 11.6 full time equivalent (FTE) staff were doing virtually f*ck all. Instead of sacking half of them and ensuring the remainder actually did some work, bent Labour commissioned a report from a company called Promodo Limited to examine what had gone so horribly wrong.

Incidentally, the FOI also showed that I am the only journalist in the whole world banned from communication with the dog-sh*t chroniclers!

Promodo duly produced a document full of the usual management-b*lls. In a classic line considering the myriad disclosures of horrendous failings in the bent Borough, and the fact that the Government had to intervene, they opined that "Sandwell is a well-run Authority" - ROFLMAO!

Incredibly, they recommended INCREASING the press office from 11.6 to 19 FTE idlers including SIX managers. What happened next is also a microcosm of all that is wrong at the corrupt Council. The matter was referred to the Cabinet. Instead of simply attaching this joke piece of work to the Agenda, bent Labour said they would hide it from public view on the astonishing basis that firms would not wish to earn thousands of pounds writing this guff for the Council if they knew their drivel they presented would be made public. WTF???

As usual, members of the bent paid service presented instead their own version of the information. This is also done as most Labour Councillors are to lazy to read the papers for meetings and too stupid to understand them if they do.

And we have seen the results of this tampering with the evidence go horribly wrong many times before haven't we readers? Perhaps the most egregious example was Cllr Paul Moore and Dr Alison Knight putting the disastrously "faulty" Report on Lion Farm to the Cabinet in 2017 - to support as corrupt a deal as there has been in the history of this blog.

Further, payments of over £500 to those doing business with the Council have to be listed BY LAW (save in exceptional circumstances where, for example, the payments relate to children/vulnerable persons care) and yet Surjit Tour and Kim Bromley Derry initially tried to conceal how much Promodo were paid for the gobbledygook!

Happily sense has prevailed at one level at least and the Promodo Report has been disclosed. (I won't put a link to it as it is not worth reading.) 

This year bent Labour jacked up the council house rents and council tax by the maximum allowed by law as they impose huge costs on hard-pressed locals. Of course, they have millions of pounds of debt now from the Commonwealth [sic] Games. But they have still decided to blow an EXTRA £305,100 a year on the hapless press office i.e. an annual figure increased to a whopping £842,000 - well over, three-quarters of a million pounds! Oh, and they confirm they paid £9,920 to Promodo on top. But there you go folks, that's Sandwell Labour's cost of living crisis for you!

Of course, the increase in press office numbers has nothing whatsoever with bent Labour panicking about the Tories in Sandwell taking parliamentary and council seats. Oh no.

THE SANDWELL SKIDDER - COMMUNITY NEWS - READ THE SKIDDER, KIDDER!

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