COMMENT - Snail's pace Sheffield is costing us a fortune

Sadly, that’s Sheffield today as millions of pounds are lost to inflation - and why? Because everything takes so long.

The soaring cost of energy and food aren’t Sheffield City Council’s fault, nor is the war in Ukraine, or Brexit, or the pandemic. But they have driven prices up and the availability of people and supplies down and had a major effect on slow moving projects in Sheffield.

The government announced £15m for the city centre on Boxing Day 2020 but work is only set to start on Fargate two years and three months later, in March 2023. In the meantime certain costs have doubled from £8.82m to nearly £18m, forcing the project to be scaled back.

Some ​​£15.8m was anounced for Castlegate in November 2021 but work has yet to start on site and council chiefs are warning inflation may mean big chunks of the original plan may not happen. Five multi-million pound active travel schemes announced in November 2020 should have been completed by March this year, but none have started yet.

A Sheffield city centre bike hub was announced years ago. A location and an operator have been found but that is all. Meanwhile, the costs have soared from £250,000 this time last year to £410,000 today.

What makes it worse is that local politicians have long claimed government has slashed funding to Sheffield over the last decade. Yet when we do get some, much of it is being lost. Not only is that a tragedy for us, but it sends a terrible message to ministers who are so keen on a survival-of-the-fittest approach to distributing taxpayers’ cash.

The council says it doesn’t have the capacity any more. But if just some of the money in these multi-million projects was used to increase staffing on them they would move along a lot faster - and easily pay for themselves. Yes, there are rules around spending but that’s where leadership comes in. Speeding up delivery must become top priority across all departments because snail's pace Sheffield is costing us a fortune.

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