Senior Lib Dem councillor Iain Brodie Browne has expressed his concern at the refusal of Sefton Council Leader Ian Maher to come clean over the true cost of professional advisors employed over the controversial £32 million purchase of the Bootle Strand Shopping Centre.

But research carried out by Southport Lib Dem councillors has revealed what the Council’s Labour leadership wanted to keep quiet – which is that Sefton Council has already spent a staggering £684,000 on outside professional “advice”, and that figure is likely to rise even further.

At Thursday evening’s council meeting held at Southport Town Hall, Birkdale councillor Iain Brodie Browne submitted a formal written question to Cllr Maher. He asked ‘would the Leader please supply, in table form, details of professional and similar charges incurred so far, to include the following: Name of Supplier, a brief description of the services supplied and the amount invoiced to date’.

However the Labour Leader declined to do so on the night, saying merely that it would be available ‘in due course’.

“There’s no excuse for the Labour Party to try and conceal this information at the present time,” says Cllr Brodie Browne. “The public, as well as opposition councillors, have a right to know how public money has been spent. For Cllr Maher to try and kick this into the long grass is simply unacceptable.”

However Southport Lib Dem councillors have carried out their own investigation, using freely published data, and think they have found the answer – which is that at least £684,000 has been spent on outside advisors.

“What Cllr Maher appears to have forgotten is that all councils are required to regularly publish details of all invoices over £500. In fact Sefton Council does this on its own website in a section called ‘Transparency Reports’,” explains Cllr Brodie Browne.

“What we have found there is that there are a number of enormous invoices from firms like PricewaterhouseCoopers, Addleshaw Goddard and Lambert Smith Hampton, all charged to a particular cost centre UA25. These are Tax Accountants, lawyers and property consultants respectively.”

“We’ve even managed to get hold of a copy of the largest invoice – for £205,950 + VAT – from PriceWaterhouseCoopers, and when you see that includes ‘Tax Structuring and Due Diligence’, then even more suspicions are raised.”

“So what we now know is that over two-thirds of a million pounds has been spent, and that was only to the end of August. That will almost certainly have risen even more.”

“This lack of openness from Sefton Council’s Labour leadership is simply unacceptable.”

Has he really gone all out and printed A3! Maybe he used the Lib Dem printing society used to in “avoidance” of some rules:

https://politicalscrapbook.net/2013/...ies-explained/

In the spirit of transparency rather that the current Lib Dem bandwagon being jumped on here’s the actual minutes including that Cllr Maguire was briefed

http://modgov.sefton.gov.uk/document...ouncil.pdf?T=9

It also includes some of the questions from the exiled Cllr Dawson which one can only guess was what he was referring too in his menacing message on the other site Facebook about “the truth will come out and it won’t be nice” about the park funding that they’ve earmarked for own pet projects. If that was his attempt to find the conspiracy theory then he should be very disappointed.

We do really have some nasty and uncooperative councillors, just hoping one day someone cleans it up and gets the council to work rather than boost the egos of the libs who’ve delivered nothing but spite and bitterness in the town. The parties and countil should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves

Back to the original story though, if they didn’t get professional advice then they’d be complaining, so who would you get advice from instead? Prasnee maybe, but seems to have disappeared of late.

The staggering bill for "advice" should not be buried beneath party political point scoring.


Never mind A3 I would want it on the side of a bus its a preposterous amount.

Originally Posted by local

The staggering bill for "advice" should not be buried beneath party political point scoring.


Never mind A3 I would want it on the side of a bus its a preposterous amount.

Agreed but there’s such a turgid stream of point scoring from the party who think their role is to monitor/criticise rather than do that it all gets lost....a press release over the last weeks from pretty much every publicity hungry Lib Dem makes it just look like a political football for them.

Even without involving pwc the cost of John Pughs failed blocking of Sainsbury’s at Meols cop cost £134k but you don’t hear that being bemoaned. The nexus report almost seems cheap in comparison to these things!

Originally Posted by Username2016

Agreed but there’s such a turgid stream of point scoring from the party who think their role is to monitor/criticise rather than do that it all gets lost....a press release over the last weeks from pretty much every publicity hungry Lib Dem makes it just look like a political football for them.

Even without involving pwc the cost of John Pughs failed blocking of Sainsbury’s at Meols cop cost £134k but you don’t hear that being bemoaned. The nexus report almost seems cheap in comparison to these things!

I agree with most things you say about the LibDems and their failure to deliver anything meaningful in Southport over the decades. However, although their motives are probably self serving on this - we should not lose sight that the Sefton Labour administration have spent such a large sum on advice. Some of which is Tax advice which no doubt informed Sefton's decision to buy the company and not the property and so avoid stamp duty. The very thing they have denied at Sefton Labour level and nationally. It would be very interesting to understand what this tax advice was and what the Sefton debate and decision making process was around this whole area of spending - when at the same time they are closing children's swings in Southport.

Originally Posted by Username2016

Agreed but there’s such a turgid stream of point scoring from the party who think their role is to monitor/criticise rather than do that it all gets lost....a press release over the last weeks from pretty much every publicity hungry Lib Dem makes it just look like a political football for them.

Even without involving pwc the cost of John Pughs failed blocking of Sainsbury’s at Meols cop cost £134k but you don’t hear that being bemoaned. The nexus report almost seems cheap in comparison to these things!

Pot calling Kettle! It was Labour who complained about the amount of money that it cost to obtain legal advice for the blocking of Sainsbury's to be built at Kew. However - John Pugh hid nothing. He made it quite clear what he was doing and he was right in trying to establish that yet another supermarket in that area, with yet another petrol station was excessive. So - what were we told about Labour's proposals for the Bootle Strand? I do not recall seeing anything until the deed was done - and costs??
It is not the advice received that concerns me - it is the high cost of such advice that should be investigated. How can such costs, both for Sainsbury's and even more so for the Bootle Strand - be justified? Are those involved in such professional undertaking incapable of dispensing such advice by the ability for which they are supposed to be trained? Are these people so incompetent that they need to seek additional advice from a large number of people? If so, then they should not be allowed to seek compensation for their own lack of ability.
Also, the councils are as much to blame - for they simply foot all financial requests without question, they always have done so. They leave themselves wide open to less than transparent transactions as indicated by examples of the invoice shown.

Oh the irony haha. Imagine the costs for Southport's departure from Sefton, which would be very welcomed. I suspect there would be no moaning about costs then, even though it would cost millions and millions 🤔🙄😏

Wow that's a BIG invoice.