Wirral Council’s top boss said an independent investigation was now needed to restore trust and had political support
23:12, 02 Sep 2025Updated 23:12, 02 Sep 2025
Works taking place on Europa Boulevard in Birkenhead(Image: Copyright Unknown)
A Wirral councillor said the way a £24m town centre scheme was handled “honestly smells” as he believes they need to find out “what was going on behind the scenes”. Another said the project had faced “disaster after disaster”.
Responding to the criticism over a regeneration scheme covering much of Birkenhead town centre, the current top boss at Wirral Council Jason Gooding said there needed to be a culture change as he prepares to bring independent investigators in. The acting chief executive said the local authority needed to restore trust going forward.
On September 2, councillors on the local authority’s audit and risk management committee gave officers a tough grilling over how things had gone so wrong following an internal investigation.
The report was commissioned by finance director Matthew Bennett. He told councillors: “There is no redeeming feature in this report that suggests anything was done well.”
The works in the town centre are currently expected to finish in April or May next year but officers said they are working to bring things forward. Mr Bennett said they didn’t know the final costs of the project, though it is currently estimated to be £24m, up from an original £11.9m budget.
The only council department to come out unscathed was the council’s internal investigation team who were praised for their work. Issues raised included a risk assessment done before the scheme started, the culture within the council and why a dispute between departments wasn’t reported, and the management of regeneration funds.
Liberal Democrat Cllr Stuart Kelly had particular concerns about a breach of the council’s contract rules after the local authority entered negotiations with a potential bidder. He said the council needed to know “what was going on behind the scenes in regeneration,” adding: “It smells, it honestly smells.”
Later in the meeting, he said: “Reading between the lines, it’s almost clear to me and I’d want to be dissuaded on this that regeneration knew who they wanted to give the contract to,” adding: “We need to drill down with this. This is almost misconduct in public office.”
He said regeneration officers would have known about a £4m overspend early on in the scheme and feared this might have been why the council scrapped its original plans to build a new Birkenhead Market on the town’s former House of Fraser. He said: “We can’t get away from the fact that the decision on the market was probably pushed through to close the gap.”
Conservative Cllr Jenny Johnson said: “Where on earth do we start? This is an absolutely abject failure on every single level. It’s an unmitigated disaster and I for one am absolutely appalled.” She said the failure was wider than regeneration in the council.
Green Cllr Jo Bird said: “Nobody has said sorry. Why is that? Is that because nobody is sorry? It’s really not good enough.” She said one thing she had learned was to seriously question what she was told by officers going forward.
Labour Cllr Mike Sullivan said: “It’s a perfect storm of incompetence from the top right down to the bottom,” adding: “There was nobody who put their hands up and said look this is becoming an absolute disaster.”
Top bosses at the council said they would be working to address the issues raised and promised a culture change in the council to prevent the situation from ever happening again. Neighbourhoods director Jason Gooding, who has been covering for chief executive Paul Satoor since June, said the council needed to ask “why do we not have a culture in which officers are confidently escalating these concerns?”
He said he couldn’t offer assurances the situation was a one-off event and the council would be looking to commission an independent inquiry, something he said political parties supported, adding: “It does create a concern and a question mark around the environment in which those behaviours and those decisions were made.”
Mr Gooding said the council needed to build confidence and the external review would be a first step to provide reassurance the council understood its problems and fix them, adding: “I and my colleagues want to commit to rebuilding trust.”
After questions were raised by Cllr Jo Bird about legal oversight of the contract, director of law and governance Jill Travers said: “Only people knew certain pieces of the jigsaw,” adding officers “gave the advice based on what was understood at that time.” She said legal advice given had previously been ignored and the council would also look at disciplinary proceedings if necessary.
Councillors at the end of the meeting resolved to note the investigation report and receive the council’s action plan at a meeting on November 4. Conservative, Green, and Liberal Democrat councillors also voted to add contracts around active travel and regeneration schemes to the local authority’s list of risks going forward.