Cambridgeshire and Peterborough combined authority under the leadership of the Labour Mayor Nick Johnson was to administer Government funding to improve the energy efficiency of homes of low-income households (under £30,000) living in their area. This covered the whole of the Southeast region. The County Council leader, Liberal Democrat Lucy Nethsingha has repeatedly been asked why this funding needed to be returned and her simple answer has been the lack of capacity in the industry. Having read and circulated the letter addressed to Mayor Nick Johnson I was surprised Cllr Nethsingha maintains that lack of capacity in the industry is the case. Judge for yourself, the link to the letter from Lord Callanan to why the Mayor could no longer be trusted to administer the fund is here https://bit.ly/3SIe9Ag
Some highlights:
The decision to centralise all procurement and delivery was the choice of the SE Hub (i.e. The CPCA) (on LAD 2), something which your Local Authorities within the Hub raised concerns around at the time, ……………this has undoubtedly contributed to the delays
Since January 2022, BEIS (The government body) have received formal complaints from four councils regarding SE Hub’s lack of communication and ability to manage delivery under LAD 2
BEIS LAD 2 Delivery team, Communications team and Deputy Director met with the SE Hub management to request that the Hub improve their communications strategy with their LAs.
In October 2021, BEIS formally requested that the SE Hub submit a recovery plan. The plan failed to meet the required standard; it did not include for example, critical KPI information or, importantly, adequate assurance to BEIS
The delivery teams within BEIS have done all that they can to support the SE Hub with delivery and have met with them weekly to discuss progress. However, despite this support, the SE Hub informed the LAD 2 delivery team in April that the projected spend was likely to be reduced to around £12m. (From an original £80m allocation).
It is clear to see from the significant shortfall of the amount spent and homes delivered being reported to BEIS that the SE Hub have failed to deliver even a small proportion of the figures signed off in these plans. This raises considerable concerns for BEIS on the strength and ability of the governance that the SE Hub have in place to monitor and assure delivery.
Under Sustainable Warmth, of the £118m awarded, only £56k has been spent to date,
Your current plans indicate you will deliver just, a third of your allocation due to your poor delivery performance and assurance processes. This has severely jeopardised both schemes performance. As I stated in the meeting, HMT believe the approach of providing Local Authorities and Energy Hubs the ability to deliver our schemes is not proving to be successful
and they have identified they may prefer removing delivery from you to a more centralised delivery.
What is sickening about this whole fiasco, is that these homes are occupied by the very households that will be affected the most by the current cost of living pressures. An obviously desperately poor performance by the Mayor and what can only be described as a blasé factually remiss response from Cllr Nethsingha, that some would describe as a cover up for her political partner.
Councillor Steve Count 