Whatever happened to NIRAH?

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.