On Monday 20th November, the Tories on Sutton Council called an Extraordinary Council Meeting on the pretext of scrutinising the Council’s decision to appoint Greenwich Leisure to run the Borough’s 4 leisure centres for the next 26 months.
The decision to appoint Greenwich was taken after Sutton Community Leisure (SCL) exercised their right to quit the contract with the Council. Despite the tight timetable the Council attracted a number of competitive tenders and selected Greenwich as the organisation best equipped to run the centres and assure a seamless handover from SCL at the end of the year.
Throughout the whole process – a period of just a few weeks – the Tories have been kept well briefed on developments by Graham Tope, Lead Councillor for Leisure. So imagine my surprise when they decided to requisition this to Council – supposedly to scrutinise the decision!
If the Tories had been serious about wanting to scrutinise the decision they would have brought it to the relevant Performance Committee. This was pure 'politicking', and the way some Tory Councillors played with local people's concerns about the future of our leisure centres through scaremongering in the local press was disgraceful.
The Tories ended up looking foolish, and wasted a lot of Council Tax payers money on a special meeting that they did not know how to use and did not need.
With the decision on Greenwich now taken, the Tories have up to two years to scrutinise the future leisure contract that will be let when this one runs out. I will be interested to see whether they do this.
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