Labour and Greens block external review into Fargate Container Park

Labour and Green councillors in Sheffield have come under fire for blocking a proposal from the Liberal Democrats to have external oversight into the controversial Fargate Shipping Container Park.

The project, which has already cost taxpayers £140k more than its £300k budget, was voted unanimously to be placed into storage with a plan to eventually distribute the individual units to community groups.

Liberal Democrat councillors proposed an amendment for the internal council review to have external oversight, however this was blocked by Labour and Green councillors.

The decision has been met with outrage from local residents who feel that Labour and Green Party councillors are trying to sweep this under the rug without proper accountability or transparency.

Shaffaq Mohammed, leader of Sheffield Liberal Democrats, said: “I’m shocked that even after this astounding failure, this Council still expects the public to trust its own account of events. It’s not good enough that they want to keep it all behind closed doors.

With best wishes to our Audit team, for this to be seen as anything but a whitewash, we need an external oversight into issues like the original location of the container park over a major sewer leading to objections from Yorkshire water, the missing power point that lead to the use of a diesel generator that was used none stop for months costing at least £10,000 per month and the incomplete work to install a lift to the first floor that required a further £180,000 on top of the £440,000 spent on the project to date.
  
"Thanks to Labour and the Greens, this will now only be looked at by an internal Council Audit team. This is a really serious blow, not only to public confidence in the Council, but also to Central Government’s confidence that we can be trusted with public grant money.
  
"It’s no wonder that we’ve lost out last week on our £36 million bid to the latest round of the Levelling Up funding from the Government, if we’re happy to waste half a million and then mark our own homework on it.”