The Devil's Own Blog From God's Own County

SO it's goodbye Bradford Centre Regeneration (Yorkshire Post, May 6). You won't be missed. You've been useless since day one.

And now it's been proved that you couldn't regenerate an outside toilet, never mind a city centre.

Cut through all the Bradford Council waffle about the reasons for its demise – and they've come to the same conclusion.

Set up in the wake of the Bradford riots, BCR has spectacularly failed in its remit – to "regenerate" Bradford city centre. And a half. Because the centre is now in a worse – far worse – condition than ever. It looks like a run-down dump, and it has gained a national reputation for it, with no apparent future other than yet more failure.

Thanks a bunch, Maud Marshall. We'd never be like this without you.

And how much has BCR's failure to deliver cost the public over the last six years?

Add up the vast amounts of public money (your money,
our money) it has got through, and it is staggering. Money wasted on (for starters): BCR's famous no-expense-spared running costs; Will Allsop's ridiculous, unbuildable
toytown vision of the city; The Park At The Heart; The World Mile shopping experience; the Bradford/Shipley Canal; the Forster Square Marina; and last but not least – the great Broadway/Westfield farce.

Each fantasy more ridiculous than the last and each costing a fortune to develop. Or rather not develop.

Lucky, it's only public money. Only the public sector can get way with such failure after failure, disaster after disaster – and keep their fat public-sector wages, payoffs and pensions.

As soon as one project was exposed as a hopeless mess and abandoned, it was on to the next.

What's to show for it? Almost nothing that wouldn't have happened anyway.

There should be, must be, a public investigation into BCR and what happened to the public money it spent. There should be naming and shaming.

So what happens now? Bradford Council say they are taking over responsibility for "future regeneration". Which, as we all know, means they haven't got a clue what to do next.