Interesting outburst from Georgina Hill who is seeking election for the post of Police and Crime Commissioner in Northumbria Police

16 September 2018

Letter to the editor, Hexham Courant.

Dear Sir,

It was good to see your newspaper publishing the ‘outburst’ from Councillor Georgina Hill, Chair of the County Councils Audit Committee who attempted to denigrate the role of the Police and Crime Commissioner Dame Vera Baird and tried to politicise Northumbria’s new Chief Constable, Winton Keenan. Since the Police have stated on several occasions that there is no criminal investigation into ARCH, its probably in preparation for her committee running even more ‘sensations’ from the Company ARCH through its meetings outside of its agenda.

My only concern with the report in your newspaper was the indication that ARCH from 2013-2017 under the last administration was purely ‘Labour’. I can assure you and your readers it was not.

The Board of ARCH during those years was made up of a top executive from the building trade, one of the regions most respected lawyers, a chairman of a university, a housing charity chief executive, members of each political party including the present Leader of Council Cllr Peter Jackson and the company secretary was a professional from one of the Country’s better known experts in that field, Eversheds, with the Board being served by professional directors representing each field of work. The responsibilities of internal audit were handled by the Councils partnership with North Tyneside Council and externally audited for most of those years by Deloitte.

I can also assure your readers that although the Tory manifesto contained the statement that they would scrap ARCH, Councillor Jackson never spoke on that subject or informed the ARCH Board of his party’s intentions prior to the manifesto’s publication.

Of course most of us are waiting for the outcome of the current administrations first full year of running ‘Tory’ ARCH which will change its name to Advance shortly. Its decisions to shrink the business by halting work outside of Northumberland and divesting itself of its executive housing portfolio, may have placed taxpayers assets at considerable risk?. We’ll wait and see.

Yours Sincerely

Councillor Grant Davey

Leader of Northumberland Labour Group