Forums Forums Wirral Information Wirral Council Williamson Art Gallery to get £1.3M - grrr

This type of thing makes my blood boil yet I am fully in favour of maintaining our heritage.

Yes, I believe in maintenance to keep our heritage, not this pathetic concept of sudden large grants and then leaving things to decay.

The art gallery has had a leaky roof for some time now, yet we couldn't find the relative pittance of money to repair it, luckily someone managed to find a number of cheap buckets to contain the disaster.

£1.3M should be put in maintenance funds for maintaining our heritage, not for letting things being left to rack and ruin.

Councils are starved of money but can "gamble" on getting grants to do work which leaves them little choice but to run this uneconomical destruction of our heritage.

Further thoughts on this matter ...

Wirral got only 0.85% of the North West's lottery grants.

School Academies being built at enormous cost when most schools' maintenance is appalling.

Birkenhead Park getting a "refurbishment grant" of £10M, much of which was on creating a new building that was totally out of character - how is that refurbishment?

St Luke's, Poulton, demolition and new build planned at cost of £10M to alleviate the repair bill of only £1M.

Yes, I'm off on one grrrrrrrrrr

How often does the Counci build something and then give it no money to do running repairs? I am right with you DD it makes me mad too.

Councillors only do these things to get their name on a project and this enables them to puff their chests out and tell everyone what a good egg they are. We have them over here too. We live on a river that many years ago used to have barges on it, horse drawn. They spent money on a sculptured sail to signify the history of the barges being moored up here. They then put in a tilt bridge, fully engineered, to replace a footbridge. They then put in a slip way for boats to be launched, which is blocked off with bollards. They brought a boat in by lorry, off-loaded it into the river, took some pictures, loaded the boat back on the lorry and took it away. They had to do this because the river is un-navigable and has been since the beginning of the 20th century to my knowledge. The water at the slipway is about 2 foot deep and there will never be any boats coming up here in the next 100 years at least. The last bit of navigable river is over 7 miles downstream. The amount of money spent on this must be huge and they justify it by saying that it is from grants and not from the council tax pot. To my mind waste is waste and it doesn't matter where it comes from. Piss poor management is what it boils down to but it may help for you to know that you are not on your own.