Council project comes in… under budget?
Plus Lower Thames Crossing decision imminent, a testing Medway Test, news in brief, and more
Did you hear about the big council project that came under budget? No, us either. At least not until this week, anyway, as Medway Council have managed to underspend by £1.5m on the new Cozenton Park Sports Centre. Rather than help plug the overall budget gap, they have some plans on what to do with it. We’ve got the full details below. Further down, there’s news on a messy miscommunication over the Medway Test, an imminent decision on the Lower Thames Crossing, news in brief, and more.
Council project comes in… under budget?
In November 2022, Medway Council approved a budget of £23.65m to demolish and rebuild Splashes in Rainham, which has since been rebranded as the far snappier Cozenton Park Sports Centre.
Somehow, this has managed to be completed with £1.5m left over, something almost unheard of in council circles.
As such, the question now becomes what to do with that money.
Of course, the boring, sensible answer would be to just put it back into the council funding pot, which remains on something of a knife edge.
However, Medway Council doesn’t seem hugely interested in the sensible and boring route, as they are looking to divert the money into Medway’s other leisure centres.
A report going to Medway Council’s Cabinet next week proposes using the £1.5m to modernise Medway Park in Gillingham and Strood Sports Centre. Ostensibly, this is with the aim of improving revenue generation at the two sites.
The Labour administration of Medway Council has set itself the challenge of making all leisure centres operate without subsidy by 2027. They still have some way to go, given that the subsidy for 2023-24 is £922,000.
According to the report, progress is already being made toward that target with increased memberships and reduced marketing costs. However, high utility bills are continuing to put pressure on the figures.
Hoo Sports Centre is set to be made more energy efficient with a separate £1m investment, and the Strand will receive new facilities as part of a £300,000 pot. This means that Medway Park and Strood are the sites designated as most in need.
While the report is unclear on exactly how the money should be spent, it does present a list of needed facilities and renovations at the two centres:
Both pools are over 50 years old and need modernising
The sports hall floor at Strood is over 25 years old and becoming unsafe
Medway Park’s changing rooms and toilets are over 40 years old
Strood’s football pitches should have had new carpet laid 10 years ago
The fitness studios at Medway Park are too small and outdated
Medway Park doesn’t have enough gym space to meet demand
The new Cozenton Park Sports Centre has accessible swimming pools, and there is an aspiration to do the same at Medway Park and Strood.
The report recommends investing the money in the other sports centres by arguing that putting £1.5m back into the overall council budget would only have a ‘marginal direct impact.’
Whether or not this is the best use for the money is for smarter people to decide, but it must be nice to be in a position where £1.5m is a relatively trivial amount of cash.
Lower Thames Crossing decision imminent
If you want an indication of why we can’t get much done as a nation, the proposed Lower Thames Crossing is a great example of it.
Despite multiple governments being in favour of it and some local councils along the route (including Medway) eager for the regeneration and connectivity opportunities it should bring, it’s going to be at least two decades at a cost of £9bn from it’s first proposal to actually being built and opened. And that’s on the most optimistic timline.
The Lower Thames Crossing, in case it wasn’t clear from the name, is a proposed new crossing of the Thames further to the east than the Dartford Crossing, which is designed to alleviate congestion there, and open up a new route between Kent and Essex.
From a Medway point of view, it would offer a way to cross to Essex from our towns in less than ten minutes which, as anyone who has ever tried to visit the Lakeside Ikea on a Saturday afternoon could tell you, is a lot less time than it currently takes.
A ridiculously long planning application (seriously, it’s 360,000 pages) was submitted in 2022 after a previous version was withdrawn, and was due to be decided earlier this year before a General Election selfishly got in the way. Now, the Department for Transport is set to make a decision on the plan by the end of next week. Evidence suggests the government is minded to move forward with the plans, even if Chancellor Rachel Reeves ponders seeking private finance to make it work.
In an ideal world, we wouldn’t need the Lower Thames Crossing. Large scale road infrastructure is increasingly difficult to justify on an environmental level, and induced demand means new capacity alone rarely being the answer.
That said, the Lower Thames Crossing would offer economic benefits for Medway, slashing travel time between our towns and places like Chelmsford, Tilbury, and, er, Basildon, on the other side of the river.
Just don’t expect those benefits anytime soon. Even if the government gives the go-ahead to start digging, we’re looking at 2031 at the earliest before work would be complete. So we’re going to be sitting in traffic to get our Kallax shelves from Ikea for a little while longer yet.
A testing Medway Test
Last week, students from Medway and beyond took the Medway Test (the modern 11+ for anyone of a certain vintage), and immediately, everything went a little bit weird.
The Medway Test is a uniquely Medway exam that students need to pass to gain entry to our grammar schools. There is a whole secondary debate here about the merits of academic segmentation, but that’s for another day. The test itself is taken by students in Medway and large numbers from outside of the area whose parents have decided to try and send them to Medway’s grammar schools.
As soon as the exams were over, parents started raising issues on social media, particularly around the amount of time allocated for the English section of the test.
The issue seems to have stemmed from the fact that parents believed this part of the exam would last an hour because the guidance Medway Council issued ahead of the exam said it would ‘not exceed an hour.’
And not exceed an hour it did, with students being given precisely half that to complete the exam.
Inevitably, students who had completed practice papers from GL Assessment, the company Medway Council employs to write the exams, found they suddenly had a lot less time in the real thing, after 50 minutes was set for the practice papers.
At first, Medway Council came out swinging, with Cllr Tracey Coombs, portfolio holder for education telling the BBC that the council would not be reviewing it "because it’s been an absolute level playing field" and "the 30-minute time limit was the same for all children.”
Later statements were slightly more concillatory, accepting that things could have been clearer, and apologising for any stress or anxiety:
“There isn’t a standardised length of time for the Medway Test exams as the test design and the length of the tests can differ each year. However, we appreciate that the guidance around the timing of the English exam could have been clearer. To ensure this is the case moving forward, when we write to parents and carers to confirm the arrangements for their child’s test, we will also include advice on how long each test will last.”
Of course, the Conservative opposition on Medway Council seized the opportunity to criticise the administration for the perceived failure in communication in a statement from their spokesperson for children’s services and education Cllr Mark Joy:
“There are serious questions that need to be answered by the Portfolio Holder in relation to the Medway Test this year, and I will be writing to her later this morning. I am concerned that the GL Assessment timing was different to what was shown on their website and the fact that the Portfolio Holder stated that all children have had to face the same criteria, when not all children have yet sat the test. I am concerned she is not grasping the seriousness of this situation.
I am calling on the Portfolio Holder to give a guarantee to Medway children that they will not be disadvantaged compared to out of area children who sit the Medway test later this weekend.”
How serious the situation is remains to be seen. It is unclear whether the out of area students sitting the exam after the news initially broke would have had an advantage if they discovered at the last minute that the exam was only 30 minutes. Given the marking system for the test is based upon ensuring 26% of Medway students in the relevant year group are eligible for a grammar place, it doesn’t initially seem like it would have a great deal of impact.
Oddly enough, over the border in the rest of Kent, there were no such issues in communicating the length of the exam. Kent, which unsurprisingly uses the Kent Test, does have a slightly different structure to their version, but it is also put together by GL Assessment. Despite this, they were able to tell parents and students in advance that the English section of the paper would take 30 minutes.
In brief
💉 Bookings are now open for this year’s covid and flu vaccinations. Anyone over 65, care home residents, pregnant women, those with underlying health conditions, and frontline health and care staff are eligible for free jabs.
🍻 Kent Police have withdrawn their request to review the licence of the Sans Pareil pub in Wainscott. The landlord claims the request was a disproportionate response to his failure to fill in a form.
🚌 Medway Council Planning Committee is tomorrow night (Wed 25 Sep). The big ticket item is an application from the Fenn Bell Inn pub and zoo in St Mary Hoo to build 44 homes on their land that has local residents so outraged that they have booked a coach to attend the meeting en masse.
🏫 Inside the new Maritime Academy school in Wainscott. The school, run by the Thinking Schools Academy Trust, has 600 students and will grow to 1,100 in the coming years.
🎙️ Medway Council Leader Vince Maple was recently on the Cherrywood Podcast. He talks about his life in politics and the challenges of leading an area like Medway.
More Authority
Over the weekend, we talked with Katalin Takács, baker and owner of Mrs Sourdough Bakery in Chatham, which arguably makes the best bread in Medway.
“Everyone's sourdough is different”
While many people have made and developed their own sourdough loaf, Katalin Takács took it to the next level. She turned it into a business. Now, Mrs Sourdough Bakery and cafe in Chatham Intra arguably makes the best bread in Medway. Steven met her there to discuss what brought her to the UK, what makes something sourdough, and whether getting enough sleep as a baker is possible.
Our paid supporters will receive our slightly delayed deep dive into Medway's crime stats later this week. There’s lots of data to ponder, so if you’re interested in receiving it when we publish it, ensure you are signed up to receive all of our editions.
Footnotes
If you enjoy Local Authority, please share it with your friends, family, associates, and enemies. We have no meaningful marketing budget, so we rely on word of mouth from our readers to find new readers. You can even get some sweet rewards for sending new readers our way. Details here.
I believe the Lower Thames Crossing will offer negligible economic benefit to Medway, but will cause substantial environmental damage...