I SHOULD like to reinforce the remarks made by "Public Servant" in your last edition on the subject of the Salt Ayre scandal.

The shocking control (or lack of it) which led to the waste of yet another million pounds of tax payers' money was bad enough. However, what is almost unbelievable is that seemingly the massive overrun took everybody by surprise.

This simply doesn't happen on properly-run projects. Admittedly, things go wrong, the weather holds things up, materials are delivered late, and so on, but there are meant to be careful and comprehensive reporting systems. As an example, it would have been normal for the quantity surveyors to submit monthly financial statements. These allow project managers to take remedial action, to cut costs or go to the financiers for more money.

Are we supposed to believe there were no financial statements? If there weren't strong action needs to be taken. But if there were, and they were ignored, then this needs remedying too.

In effect, what the council officials would have us believe is that all sorts of things did go badly wrong, to the tune of a million quid, and no one noticed until afterwards.

Salt Ayre isn't just one scandal: there's the scandal of the huge cost overrun, there's the scandal of the abject failure to control the project properly and, maybe worst of all, there's the scandal of the way in which those responsible have made little or no attempt to get to the bottom of it.

Former public servant

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.