Please be advised that there are a lot of questions about how WBC is spending the public money and the funds they receive from government, despite of one of the highest council taxes in the region.
There were clear evidences that in most cases and particularly with the proposed residential developments next to the Woking Football Club, Woking Borough Council awarded the contract worth of 250 million GBP to the single source contractor without any proper bidding process. Furthermore, if you track the contractors track record they have never ever built such scale development previously where they had to work under brownfield and greenfield construction circumstances.
As an independent group of residents living in the neighborhood, we have also found out that there were some links between the chairman of the club, head of Woking council, executive chairman and with developers who are GolDev.
Even during the hearings there were a clear understanding that Ray Morgan, David Bittleston and other members of senior advisors and councilors had a common interest of proceeding with this project even though in many of the cases It is against of the Councils and Governments own policy.
In the other instance we found out that Cllr Ian Johnsons (who is supporting the plan) spouse Rosemary Johnson is the chairman of the Woking Football Club. This raised another concerns over the lobbying of getting this project to go ahead. In general I would say there are huge amount of pressure from Woking borough council leaders to the independent or Cllrs representing the local residents interests. For example recent artificial case that was raised towards to one of the councilors of her free speech and expression of her ideas lead council to trying to take legal actions against her. Luckily council lost on that occasion and Cllr’s warning was revoked.
Leader of Council and executive board have a long term interest on the region and recently it was came into our attention that council wants further to destroy the greenbelt area, giving the permission for landowners to construct commercial / residential buildings on protected land areas. By the way this was already happened in few instances for example with Hoe Valley School and massive sports center construction. Again on this project if you do investigate the costs, as we have been told there were a lot of high rated expenditures and no supervision nor proper negotiations.
At the end, I personally would be concerned with the way how council operates and spends our money. There are a lot of grey areas and it requires a proper in depth investigation.
Regards,
Tural Huseynov