Criticism over options in Torridge Services Centre plan

Councillors are being led “down a single path” by officers over plans to build a new operational services centre for Torridge when they should have more say in the decision making, it has been claimed.

Cllr Huw Thomas (Green, Bideford East) said when it came to spending multi millions of taxpayers’ money the council should be looking at a range of options “in minute detail” not just going for “what’s easiest”.

He said plans for a new centre at Alverdiscott Road in East-the-Water on the authority’s own land, previously allocated for housing, was presented to the council “out of nowhere”.

He said it was close to residential properties and not the best place to locate a vehicle depot with HGVs coming and going all day.

The proposed centre is also expected to provide office space for employees working in waste and recycling, street cleansing, CCTV, harbour services and grounds maintenance.

It will house a vehicle workshop and parking for its vehicle fleet, as well as an educational resource centre and wildlife trail.

There will be no black bag domestic waste or processing of household recycled material on site.

Designs for the project were shared with local residents at a public meeting in April and feedback sought. Cllr Thomas said there was a lot of concern.

The councillor’s motion for members to take more of a lead on future projects which involved large amounts of council funds, major alterations to council property or the sale of council assets, was lost by 19 votes to 10 with seven abstentions at the annual general meeting of the authority.

He had said there should be three options for the operational services site, with costs, advantages and disadvantages of each option presented to council with a full discussion in public.

“We shouldn’t just pick the easy option by saying there’s a bit of land the council owns and let’s stick it there.

“We owe it to the electorate to look at things in much more detail… we are talking about big sums of money, handling millions of pounds, we would not spend  one per cent of that if it was our own money without looking at it in minute detail, we should be the same when it comes to taxpayers’ money.

“I am not against a new operational services centre as I know we need one as our current site is cramped. I am just asking who is making the decisions here, councillors or officers.”

In its proposal documents for the operational services centre the council said it had long outgrown its existing depot at Westcombe Lane in Bideford and was operating across four old and poorly serviced sites that predated the collection of recycled materials.

Various attempts had been made to secure sites and bring forward schemes since 2015 but the majority had failed for technical or financial reasons, it said.

The proposed new centre on the council’s four acre site at East-the-Water would bring everything together in one location and 50 percent of the waste and recycling  requirements for the whole district were within a ten mile radius of it, and it offered good connectivity to material processing facilities in Brynsworthy, Barnstaple and Deep Moor, Great Torrington.

“Although we have one of the better recycling rates in the UK, it is vital that we are situated within the Bideford area to further improve our operation efficiencies in the collection of household material and create capacity for the future growth of the district,” said the council.

Leader of the council, Cllr Doug Bushby (Ind, Bideford North) said there was an officer driving this project on behalf of the council but the councillors decided whether to accept the officer’s recommendations at their committees and subsequently the full council.