CURSED COUNCIL HEADQUARTERS?

By Greta Thunderface

WHO spends three years frittering away £8.3 million of public money on a grandiose new “Net Zero” Council building and then forgets to create a room suitable for, er, Council meetings?

Step forward Wokemoreland & Farcical Council – the super-duper new unitary authority serving Penrith, Kendal, and Barrow.

Council officers for the Liberal Democrat dictatorship have just had to SCRAP meetings of its monthly planning committee held at Voreda House, its energy-efficient vanity project and Penrith HQ.

Opened just seven months ago, the purpose-built carbon-neutral building was lauded by green-eyed Council officers for offering “improved air tightness, greater thermal insulation and triple glazing.”

The reality is that it is so superbly insulated that some members of the public have complained of not being able to HEAR during, er, public meetings in the “Patterdale Room”, the main venue for get-togethers in the town.

The Council has now agreed to move planning meetings lock, stock and barrel OUT of the new building, following a complaint submitted by exasperated and tireless Fresh Air for Penrith campaigner, Jeff Thomson, a one-man opposition force to the Council.

Instead, councillors, officers, applicants, planning agents, and members of the public will now schlep 1.8 miles out-of-town to hold their planning meetings at the aging Redhills Business Centre, which has an underwhelming energy efficiency rating of E.

(Not to mention all those extra carbon dioxide emissions going into the environment from additional car journeys.)

Quite why a public meeting room wasn’t, er, fitted with microphones and a proper audio system is known only to W&F.

Of the Council’s two other massive properties in Penrith – the Town Hall gathers dust, and its massive Mansion House site remains stubbornly unsold.

Reacting to this state of affairs, the Penrith public has been failing to show sufficient appreciation of the Lib Dem leadership on the Facebook Page of hyper local news site, Penrith Town, which has forcibly reported this latest twist in a long-running and sorry saga.

Readers of the Penrith Town news site branded the situation: “A comedy of errors…an absolute joke…a monstrosity of a building…absolutely disgusting…an absolute farce…heads should roll…designed by idiots, passed by donkeys, paid for by us!”

Elsewhere in Penrith, the mild-mannered independent paper, The Slumberland & Westmorland Imperilled, does not have much of a reputation for reading the Riot Act to the Council’s Lib Dem leadership.

Somehow, the paper failed to capture the public mood with this restrained and official-sounding interpretation of events (below).

The meeting room fiasco is the latest in a series of disasters for Voreda House – the pride of the Council’s Net Zero drive.

The new Penrith HQ was originally conceived as costing £2.3m and was due to open in March 2021.

The reality was it cost more than triple that at £8.3m and opened in June 2024 more than THREE YEARS overdue.

The taxpayer also paid more for the original building than it was worth.

They paid £900,000 when it was independently valued at £785,000.

Despite costing £8.3m in order to generate energy cost savings in the future, the building’s actual value is closer to the £2.3m mark.

The Council has even had to apply to itself to install an outdoor GENERATOR, complete with shed in the garden, to keep the power on in case of failure.

Instead of a Council ‘White Elephant’, The Chronic called it a ‘Green Elephant’.

We have no need to revise that initial opinion!

FACT: Over 2025-26, Westmorland & Furness will spend circa £1.1 million on its 65 councillors, and is banging up Council Tax again by nearly 5%.