NIRAH was a project to build an
Eden Project style aquarium in Bedfordshire that was started about a decade ago. Although it
attracted criticism, but eventually it attracted
money from the government and other sources.
But then it went quiet (apart from a
libel case), with concerns
raised in 2012 that NIRAH hadn't submitted its planning application, and now that
planning permission has run out completely after receiving millions of pounds of taxpayer's money.
Public records
[pdf] show that the company still exists, and still occasionally
changes directors. But the silence from NIRAH on anything has been
deafening.
It shouldn't be a surprise that NIRAH has
fallen through, leaving the status of public money uncertain. They used
to have a website of
nirah.org which outlined their plans. What
happened to that? Well, when the domain expired in April 2012 they
didn't bother to renew it and it is now something-or-other in Japanese.
You
might think that the site disappearing of the face of the Internet will
stop us looking at the project. Not a bit of it, we can use the
Internet Archive to find an
old copy of the site which does admittedly look pretty slick, and it has a couple of brochures you can download
[1] [2] with the details of the proposals.
So
perhaps the "News" section can tell us what they were up to? Not
exactly.. all those stories stop dead in May 2007, and if you look at
the
press releases you can see that information was always pretty sparse.
It
is of course purely coincidental that, having received millions of
pounds of public money, all communications from NIRAH seemed to have
dried up. But it does show a significant lack of oversight that these
funds should have been allocated in this way and so little progress has
been made. So why has there been a lack of oversight?
Well, national governments
have a habit
of chucking billions of pounds down the drain, so a few million here
and there won't make much of a difference. But for local authorities
money is always tight, and the reported £1.6m lent to NIRAH would
certainly be usefully used elsewhere. But one problem is that the
council that loaned NIRAH the cash, Bedfordshire County Council, was
dissolved in 2009 and although that money now theoretically belongs to
other local authorities, they were not the ones who were meant to have
oversight.
I know a bit about Bedfordshire County
Council.. I was a councillor on it for five years, but when I left it
was clear that it was becoming a train wreck (this
outsourcing disaster
that I always opposed is an example). The NIRAH thing happened after I
left, but I have always strongly opposed the use of public money to
support what is ultimately a high-risk
PRIVATE enterprise such as NIRAH.
My attention was drawn to the quotes in this
BBC report from 2008:
Richard Stay, deputy council leader and on the board of Nirah, said the council would get its money back.
The
aquarium would also be a scientific research centre and a visitor
attraction, four times larger than the Eden Project, in Cornwall.
Mr
Stay said: "There is value in the intellectual property rights, the
planning permission and the actual land value which more than adequately
covers the value of the loans made to Nirah.
"So if Nirah doesn't happen, we stand a pretty certain chance of getting this money back."
Now,
Cllr Stay
and myself come from very different parts of the political spectrum,
but in my personal experience I have found him to be an intelligent and
trustworthy sort of chap, so I'm really hoping that there's something to be clawed out of the ruins of this disaster.
I also noticed another quote by one of the few people who seemed to be prepared to voice reservations about NIRAH,
Susan Gaszczak:
Liberal Democrat county councillor Susan Gaszczak said: "Although it is an amazing concept... it is a time of a global credit crunch.
"It is a very difficult time to start raising that kind of money, and especially when you see the taxpayer suffering on a day to day basis."
That incidentally is a name that
you might recognise and it's another case where people should have listed more closely to what Susan was saying, in my opinion.
My personal opinion is that is it clear that NIRAH is a busted flush, as I always suspected it would be. I don't know what assets they may have, but it is time for the taxpayers to get whatever they can from whatever remains.
UPDATE: Susan shared this
very interesting transcript of a BBC item about NIRAH.