Peter Jones digs himself deeper: Have any of ESCC’s Councillors seen the DfT’s value-for-money assessment of the Link Road?

April 10, 2013 by combehavendefenders

ESCC leader Peter Jones

On Monday, East Sussex County Council (ESCC) leader Peter Jones was interviewed on BBC’s Sussex Breakfast Show, and made the extraordinary claim that neither he (nor, apparently, the other members of ESCC) had seen even the unredacted – that is, public – parts of the March 2012 Department for Transport (DfT’s) documents about whether or not the Link Road should be funded (the recommendations themselves are still a secret).

Disturbed by the possibility that Council members were unaware of the DfT’s assessment that the Road was of only “low to medium value for money”, and therefore should not have received public funding, we emailed Peter Jones a copy of the document (you can see the text of our email at the bottom of this post) and received the following bizarre response, tacitly suggesting that someone might have faked the documents because they contain unspecified “errors that no civil servant would make”:

We’re happy to confirm that the documents are genuine (they’ve been available to download from the official gov.uk web-site since May 2012 – click here to view the 19 March 2012 doc, and here for links to the others) and would love to hear more from Mr Jones about the alleged “errors”. In the meantime though, we wonder whether the the other ESCC Councillors realise that the Link Road is (according to the DfT) a “low or medium value for money” project, rather than the economic wonder-project that Mr Jones has been pushing it as for so long …

Our email to Peter Jones