How much?
Our sums total

The amount for labour is unknown because the council don’t cost labour!

Most businesses may find this incredible, but it is, we are assured, true. Indeed so little is labour costed at that CDC staff were enabled to have 10 days off work over Christmas and the New Year at a cost to those employees of either one half or one whole day’s annual leave, a gesture which even banks cannot afford to make.

The council claim that the above figure is wrong, so here’s the Freedom of Information letter from CDC of December 2005 stated that £432,250 was spent or budgeted to be spent, along with £189,925 from Yorkshire Forward already spent.
To add to those figures are an additional £90,000 voted for in February of this year, and of course the unknown labour costs.

So was any money wasted?

Eversheds and the council claim that there was ‘No wasteage at all’, we don’t accept that, but we think that you should be the judge of whether the council really took account of public opinion before being forced to by the Civic Society Poll, and whether some money was spent needlessly or not.

Cllr. Paul English stated ‘It was a beanfeast for consultants.’

So read on, and judge the facts for yourselves.

You can jump straight to the Consultation Paper by clicking here, and decide for yourself on the quality of that consultation, or you can read the whole thing. Whichever you choose, we think it’s important that your views are heard, so please let us have them! Just click on ‘Contact’ above.

Any opinions expressed in these pages, or indeed any other in this website, are the opinions of the authors and not Carl Lis,  Gill Dixon, Jonathan Kerr, Paul English, Robert Heseltine, or possibly any others at Craven District Council.

At least we think it unlikely that the above share our opinions.
N.B. You will find terms such as:
“In our opinion”;  “We think that”; and “It might appear”
Sprinkled heavily throughout this website.
This is necessary because a few officers and leaders at CDC decided to set Eversheds, a multi national firm of lawyers, upon us. They have the luxury of using our money, against us, as far as we can gather it’s somewhere between £6,000 and £7,000 so far, for apparently looking at the web site and sending us a couple of e-mails.
We think it a shame that they couldn’t apparently find a competent legal company in Craven, and had to turn to this multi national firm, but we shall not be hushed up by Craven District Council’s use of our own money in an attempt to do just that.
This is not the original web site, but as much of the content of that was from CRAG we have decided to publish our own, and hope you find it worthwhile - at least the price is right,

As councils cannot sue for defamation, libel, or slander, we have queried why this money was spent, and to what aim, it appears to be yet another waste of our money, mainly in an attempt to stifle free speech. We shall let you know when we have a response.
In our opinion.
Or that is how it might appear to be.
We think.

Around 300 years ago Machiavelli stated in ‘The Prince,’ the then revolutionary and prophetic idea that theological and moral imperatives have no place in the political arena.
"Men are always wicked at bottom unless they are made good by some compulsion." He wrote.
Of course not all men are bad, nor indeed all women! but strange things have happened at our own little Craven District Council, and the term ‘Machiavellian’ might, in the opinion of some, be applied to one or two of those happenings.
These pages will detail events between October 2003 and February 2006 when it appears that a handful of elected members and unelected officers at Craven District Council (CDC) ignored the advice to undertake professional consultants to determine the will of the people,  and in the process, budgeted to burden the public purse to, as John Major might have said: