AFTER 12 public hearings, access to hundreds of pages of documents and thousands of words of transcripts the Corporate Services Scrutiny panel has come to the conclusion that the collapse of the Lime Grove police station deal is too big an issue for it to deal with.
Its report, published this morning, has ducked the key questions about what went wrong, how the £8.25m deal fell apart and who was responsible – and has instead shifted the job over to the Comptroller and Auditor General.
The hearings about the Lime Grove deal were explosive, showing fault lines between senior ministers, painting a picture of a Property Holdings department that had ‘gone rogue’ and presenting very different versions of whether the Lime Grove deal would have been a cheap option that solved all of the problems, or an expensive disaster waiting to happen.
A full report on those questions is now unlikely to appear for several months, as the States’ independent spending watchdog Chris Swinson has agreed to review it, although he is on holiday for the next four weeks.
