CARDIFF council spent nearly £300,000 on consultants to prepare the development plan it now looks set to abandon, it has emerged.
The local authority said it spent a total of £299,499 on external advice including legal advice and evidence-based studies in drawing up its draft Local Development Plan.
Council officers are now recommending the plan, which will guide the future growth of the city until 2021, should be withdrawn from the planning process following concerns raised by Welsh Assembly Government planning inspectors.
More than a third of the money was spent on legal advice and other fees specifically relating to the proposal put forward by the council, but officials said that the majority of the £300,000 was spent on preparing evidence, such as a flood assessment, that will be used again.
Rhiwbina councillor Jayne Cowan argued the council should have used more of its own officers’ advice.
She said: “In the financial climate, I strongly feel we should have used much more internal advice as nearly £300,000 of taxpayers’ money seems a huge amount on a plan which has much uncertainty.”
Peter Cox, chairman of the Cardiff Civic Society, said the amount of money and time wasted preparing the draft Local Development Plan was a disaster for the city.
He said: “We’re in great danger of having a political row about ‘failed process’ when we should be asking: who drove the policies, who was responsible for executive management of the officers, why have the officers failed so lamentably to do what was required?
“Most of all, as we have feared all along, this is a disaster for Cardiff – wasted money, wasted council resources, and years of planning hiatus.”
A spokesman for the local authority said: “The use of consultants by local authorities is commonplace.
“While councils like Cardiff are multi-million-pound businesses there is a limit to the specific professional expertise that is available in-house.
“All councils need to call on technical help to deal with particular issues at a given time and the short-term use of consultants, like we have used for the Local Development Plan (LDP) process, is actually a cost-effective alternative to permanently employing all the detailed experience and expertise we might need.
“An example of this is the work carried out assessing how flood risk issues might affect development sites.”
He argued the costs that the council had incurred highlighted one of the flaws in the LDP process which burdened local authorities with bills that should be picked up by developers.
The Green Party yesterday raised concerns about the implications if the draft Local Development Plan, which would protect greenfield sites in the north and west of the city, was withdrawn.
Jake Griffiths, who is standing in Cardiff West at the general election, said: “Full public meetings have repeatedly shown the strong opposition there is to these proposals.
“Residents should be rightly concerned that if these developments are given the go-ahead it will give the green light to developers wishing to push through other developments in Cardiff’s green belt.”
