There’s no news like bad news and the Tories on Walsall Council are good at it.

Last Saturday on a local TV news bulletin their Deputy Leader Cllr Andrew in a one-sided exclusive repeated the misinformation he had trotted out, first at full council last Monday then in the Express and Star in the week. These actions were designed deliberately to mislead you the residents of Walsall about Walsall Council’s decision to buy the Saddlers Centre in the heart of our town.

Cllr Andrew chose the media to make statements where he glossed over the fact that there is a difference between one off payments such as the investment in purchasing the Saddlers Centre and regular payments going out on a day to day basis providing ongoing services such as bin collections, grass cutting and street cleaning. Cllr Andrew tries to make out that the council is playing monopoly with the town centre. Who is kidding who?

If the Tories had really wanted to make a serious attempt at stopping the council from buying the Saddlers Centre they had plenty of opportunity to do so. They could have attended the Cabinet meeting and demanded that part of the debate, the bit about why the council should invest in our town centre, be held in public session. They didn’t.

There was a further opportunity after the Cabinet decided on the purchase. Under the Cabinet/Scrutiny process, opposition councillors have the right to demand that they hold the Cabinet to account for making the decision. It’s called a Call In. This stops any action being taken until the Corporate Scrutiny Committee has “grilled” the Cabinet members for making the decision and could have made a recommendation back to Cabinet asking them to reconsider their decision at a special meeting. Incidentally, as a matter of interest, Cllr Andrew Chairs Corporate Scrutiny. Once again the Tories failed to act.

A decision of this size and nature has to go before the full council giving the Tories a further chance to make their case for opposing the sale. They could have insisted that the non commercially sensitive information, that is the debate around the concept of the council buying the shopping centre, should have been held in public session. Once again the Tories failed to act.

Having failed three times to take action you have to ask the reason why. There could be one or two reasons for the Tories failure to act. was it that their reasoning would not stand up to public scrutiny or was it that they were so dysfunctional they failed to keep their eye on the ball and missed their opportunities. Either way it shows that Walsall’s Tories are weak in opposition.

And what of the decision to buy the Saddlers Centre? Well we believe it was the right thing to do. There has been much concern expressed about the decline in recent years of Walsall as a shopping destination. the number of vacant shops has continued to rise so it was becoming clear that leaving things to chance and market forces would not do. Intervention by the council was an option worth exploring.

The Saddlers Centre is a gateway to Walsall for the many who come to the town by train. It’s the first thing that they see as they emerge from the train station. There are already links to the town from Liverpool, Add to this the intention to open up links to London and the prospect of new and improved local commuter services and all of a sudden the idea of intervention starts to make sense. The investment is in the form of capital which will help the council in its battle increase revenue income to the tune of around £800,000. That’s £800,000 worth of cuts to services it won’t need to make as the Westminster Government continues cutting funding to local councils.

Doing nothing is not an option.