Shirehall: Roger Evans Voted Without the Figures

No consolidation calculation, no proper joint venture appraisal and no obstacle to Cabinet approving the officer plan

Shropshire Council’s Cabinet has approved urgent steps towards selling Shirehall after its Finance Portfolio Holder admitted that the Council had not calculated the central financial alternative.

Development surveyor Jonathan Owen asked a question so basic that it should have been answered before the report was written: how much could the Council save each year by consolidating its operations into Shirehall?

Roger Evans’s published reply was: “This information is not available.”

Not difficult to obtain. Not awaiting verification. Not commercially sensitive.

Not available.

Evans then explained that the Council had neither the capital to return to Shirehall nor, following redundancies, the staff to calculate the answer. Because officers had adopted a “hub-and-spoke” accommodation model and declared Shirehall surplus, he said that “the question of consolidation savings therefore does not arise”.

There, in one reply, is the whole scandal.

The Council chose a different accommodation policy, labelled Shirehall surplus, and then used those decisions to avoid calculating whether consolidation into Shirehall might save more. The conclusion was used to abolish the question capable of disproving it.

This is not financial analysis. It is circular reasoning with a council crest on top.

Roger Evans was not an unfortunate passer-by ambushed with an obscure accounting puzzle. He is the Cabinet member responsible for finance. If the crucial comparison had not been calculated, his duty was to stop the decision until it had. Instead, he treated the absence of evidence as an explanation for proceeding without it.

A Finance Portfolio Holder who admits that the figures do not exist and then votes anyway is not exercising financial oversight. He is witnessing its absence from the best seat in the room.

Evans blamed the previous administration’s decision to leave Shirehall, blamed the lack of capital and blamed redundancies. What he did not explain was why the Liberal Democrat administration, in office since May 2025, had found time to commission another report but not the figures needed to test its recommendation.

The contradiction becomes worse when compared with Evans’s own answer in June 2025. Then he could state that the budgeted saving associated with leaving Shirehall was £1.3 million for 2025/26, with an in-year target of £1,005,540.

The Council could produce a number when it helped justify departure. When asked to calculate the costs of operating its scattered estate and compare them with consolidation, numerical ability mysteriously deserted the building.

The two calculations are not identical. That is precisely why a proper comparison was required. The numbers exist when they support leaving and evaporate when they might support returning. Shropshire Council does not follow the evidence. It issues the evidence with directions.

The cross-party Task and Finish Group had committed the unforgivable offence of investigating. It examined the building, heard professional evidence and unanimously recommended a twin-track approach. Sale should be explored, but so should refurbishment, consolidation, disposal of other Council properties and joint venture finance.

That was not nostalgia. It was scrutiny asking the obvious question: which route gives taxpayers the greatest value?

The establishment dealt with that inconvenience neatly.

After Full Council referred the group’s recommendations to Cabinet, Section 151 Officer Duncan

Whitfield, in consultation with Service Director for Place Shaping Kassandra Polyzoides, commissioned a rapid review from Chris Buss. Buss did not interview the Task and Finish Group. He did not interview elected members or officers. His report was largely a desktop review of Council documents, with factual clarification checked by the Section 151 Officer who had commissioned it.

Whitfield and Polyzoides then used that review as a “key factor” in writing the recommendations

placed before Cabinet.

Officers commissioned the review, supplied the documentary world in which it operated, checked its facts and drafted the conclusions that displaced the work of elected scrutiny. Cabinet’s role was to make the paperwork look democratic.

This may satisfy the Council’s definition of independence. It resembles the defendant commissioning the expert witness, checking the evidence and then writing the jury’s verdict.

The officer report claimed to have given “full consideration” to the Task and Finish Group. Yet its central recommendation, a properly costed comparison of both routes, was not carried out. Roger Evans’s answer confirmed that the Council had not even calculated consolidation savings.

How can officers claim full consideration of an option they did not cost?

The same report managed a further contradiction. Its own table said an unconditional sale would produce the lowest receipt because a developer would deduct demolition costs. It said a conditional sale offered the strongest receipt among the exit routes. Officers nevertheless recommended urgent marketing with minimum conditions attached.

They also attached an impressively precise-looking cost of around £4.5 million to establishing and operating a joint venture, before construction, finance or development costs. Yet the same report admitted those figures were indicative planning ranges, not quotations, and would need to be firmed through a full options appraisal with external financial and legal advice.

So the joint venture could be burdened with a multi-million-pound estimate before a full appraisal, while the annual savings that might support it could not be calculated at all.

When an alternative assists the preferred sale, an estimate will do. When it might challenge the preferred sale, the question apparently ceases to arise.

That is not evidence-led decision-making. It is evidence being admitted only after it has shown the correct identification.

Then came Cornovii.

Cabinet was reportedly told that there had never been an intention to “give” Shirehall to Cornovii. That claim depends entirely on one narrow word doing the work of an entire public-relations department.

Council documents record that an early sale to Cornovii Developments Limited at market value was considered. Cornovii was then chosen to undertake the planning work and placed at the centre of the proposed development route. Chris Buss’s report records that if Cornovii had developed the site itself, the costs would have been financed by the Council through General Fund borrowing.

Perhaps nobody intended to present Cornovii with the title deeds inside a birthday card. That was never the allegation. Cornovii was not a detached observer peering over the municipal fence. It was positioned inside the machinery and identified as a potential purchaser and development vehicle.

Saying the site was never going to be “given” to Cornovii is technically neat and substantially misleading. It answers an accusation nobody made in order to avoid the evidence that everybody can read.

The same verbal trick appeared in the claim that Cabinet was not approving demolition. Technically, it was not. Cabinet merely approved urgent marketing with minimum conditions while allowing the eventual developer to propose demolition or refurbishment.

The Council has not protected Shirehall from demolition. It has outsourced the decision, along with the future profit and much of the political responsibility.

Having approved that process without the costed joint venture comparison scrutiny had requested, Leader Heather Kidd reportedly wished Save Our Shirehall every success in developing a joint venture solution.

This was rather like pushing somebody into the river and wishing them every success with the swimming.

The Council had the authority and resources to commission Chris Buss. It apparently lacked the staff to calculate consolidation savings or develop the alternative recommended by its own scrutiny group. Volunteers are now expected to supply the imagination and analysis that the professional establishment avoided.

Roger Evans also suggested that selling Shirehall would help stabilise Council finances. Yet Cabinet had no guaranteed sale price, no published minimum acceptable receipt and no complete calculation of the abnormal costs that a purchaser will deduct from an offer.

“Stabilise” is doing the same work here as “give” did for Cornovii. It sounds reassuring while committing the speaker to almost nothing.

A one-off receipt may reduce some Exceptional Financial Support borrowing. It cannot repair the structural failure that produced the emergency. A distressed authority selling an asset for an unknown net return is not stabilising its finances. It is converting property into cash because the cash has already run out.

Cabinet nevertheless approved all thirteen officer recommendations. The permanent establishment supplied the assumptions, commissioned the supporting review, controlled the figures and wrote the route map. Most Cabinet members did what was required of them and supplied the votes.

And when it all goes tits up, as the Council’s recent record gives every reason to fear, the officers who designed the scheme will no doubt begin rehearsing the Mark Barrow manoeuvre: departing before the wreckage has cooled, while elected members remain behind clutching the minutes, defending decisions they barely understood and pretending the destination was their idea.

This is not asset management. It is the permanent establishment turning its own failure to plan into an emergency, using councillors as rubber stamps and preparing the exits before the taxpayer discovers what the decision really cost.

Hands up those who voted these clowns in – Roll on 2029.