West Midlands NO! Campaign

A couple of weeks ago, Advantage West Midlands (AWM) announced that they had run out of our money and were pulling funding for a number of projects.

At the time they refused to disclose which projects were having funding withdrawn so West Midlands NO! put in a Freedom of Information request to find out which projects they were.

Lo and behold, just before the deadline for responding to the Freedom of Information request, they have released details to the press.  AWM have shown how utterly useless and impotent they are in the face of an economic downturn and are desperately trying to manage the media coverage their quango receives to limit the damage to their appalling reputation.  As one commentator on the Express & Star website says:

Maybe this Quango should be renamed disAdvantage West Midlands

Indeed.

The projects that have had funding withdrawn appear to be mainly based outside of the ”Greater Birmingham” area such as the Flax Mill in Shrewsbury, the Market Square in Ludlow and flood defences at Tenbury.  Of the projects that are still earmarked to receive funding, only three in the Telford area are outside of the West Midlands connurbation - further evidence that AWM is only interested in “Greater Birmingham”.

Interestingly, the Birmingham New Street Station refurbishment is described as a £400m project.  AWM is putting £100m of taxpayers money into the project.  How much money will the taxpayer receive in return for this “investment”?  Surely, after “investing” billions of pounds of taxpayers money over the years AWM should be in a position to not only support itself without taxpayers money but to start paying dividends back to its “shareholders”?

Margaret Thatcher once made a comment that sums up financial black holes like Advantage West Midlands quite well:

The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other peoples’ money

When times were good and the Treasury could afford to hand over £300m a year to AWM, it was pats on backs and champagne receptions all round.  Now the British government has spent all our money bailing out Scottish banks and quango’s like AWM are being told to tighten their belts, projects that promise little or no return on investment beyond a big sign saying how wonderful AWM is, are being sacrificed.

Any organisation can throw £300m at a few local projects and create a handful of jobs but it takes an organisation that is used to working within budgets and facing annual funding cuts to do the job successfully when money is short and the economy is in recession.  An organisation like a local council, for instance …