twowheelsgood

Indeed it is. Urban dictionary succinctly defines it is; To have totally ****** something up. Usually by doing something stupid. Specifically used to describe technology that is broken. The site is once again unborked, but for how long?

The Holme Lacy site is the subject of a Council 'consultation' at the moment. The site will be sold and the funds put into the schools pot. Oh wait, the consultation hasn't finished yet. Council website is completely borked at the moment so you can't see it anyway!

It was too good to last - Herefordshire Council get your act together.

Complained to spacecraft who have responded "I believe that part of the site is powered by a system we do not look after I’m afraid. I have forwarded your email to our contact at the council." Dear oh dear.

Just wasted 40 minutes trying to submit a pre-app - twice - jumped through all the hoops, pressed the submit... and ... nothing. Filled in the contact form to complain, pressed the submit... and ... nothing So, we've no doubt paid spacecraft digital a small fortune and they've jumped in saying "We are experts in understanding your organisation and helping you realise your desired outcomes. That’s our commitment, our passion." Yeah, right.

And we're back after almost 24 hours offline - imagine if Marks & Spencer did that - they'd lose millions and heads would roll. Herefordshire Council - it's just another day - they get paid regardless.

It's been painted yet again, this time terracotta wall with black shopfront - it looks a whole lot better than the colours allegedly chosen by Planning and left half finished. Obviously they haven't bothered with anything so inconvenient as a planning permission, but hey ho.

Still unavailable to me - a whole day's work schedule messed up. The Council blame my ISP - I don't see how it can be BT's fault. Tried on several different computers - unavailable to all of them.

4.39pm. Still off - that'll be it for today then. It's a very long shortly is all I can say. I'm sure lessons will be learned.

We'll never know. Nor will we know the true cost of the new one. We do know it won't make a jot of difference, save to leave us even poorer. As British Airways found when it changed its plane tailfins, while a rebrand can breathe new life into a company it can all go horribly wrong if it isn't embraced by customers. http://www.businesszone.co.uk/branding-disasters-the-rebranding-of-british-airways

2.58pm - still offline, but now we have the rubbish 'rebranding' logo. Their facebroke page says 'we are moving across to our new website it should be back up and running shortly' - that was an hour ago - how long is shortly?

1.21pm - still offline - quite ridiculous - absolutely no excuse for this, when it is fundamental to the running of the Council and serving the County.

So our preferred partners, BBLP, will have routinely checked this tree and found that it wasn't about to fall over, so why the panic and chainsaws now? Perhaps they haven't been doing their job and haven't looked at it? Surely not. Our previous preferred partners Amey cut down a perfectly healthy, rare and historic tree in Mill Street, a criminal act, which the Council glossed over, so there is reason to question what we are paying for. I don't of course expect any answers.

I wasn't blaming the Council as I appreciate they are not directly involved in this - the parallel I was drawing, rather badly perhaps, it that Herefordshire Council have a similar track record of employing senior staff with truly terrible ethics and employment history, which is available for all to see by a simple online search. We then end up having to pay for it when it invariably goes wrong. It's all part of the Common Purpose and public service jobs roundabout I know. Self serving in the guise of serving the public.

Well, those that have appointed him clearly haven't done a simple google search - but then we've seen that so many times with our own Herefordshire Council, and it's cost us dear.

The first post in this thread back in June 2014 said; Coincidentally, a Mr Andrew Hubble resigned as principal of an academy in West Walsall earlier this year after it was found by ofsted to be inadequate in nearly all respects including leadership and management. I wonder if this is the same Mr Andrew Hubble. And, if so, what the kids at the school have done to deserve someone with that track record. It is the same Mr Hubble.

The Whitecross High School and Specialist Sports College is a PFI scheme and was struggling to cover its contractual costs as far back as early 2014 (£750k pa and rising at 3.6% pa), as reported in the HT. It's pretty obvious that the Council have been taken to the cleaners on this one - the sale of the old Whitecross School site barely covered the cost of one year of PFI payment, and that's before the cost of demolition and site clearance, which the Council paid for as well.

It was owned by Claridge Nursing Homes Ltd who developed the Hampton Grange Nursing Home and others and subsequently sold out to the Rotherford Group. It had a planning permission in 2012 for alterations (now lapsed) and a subsequent application was refused. Since then - nothing.

Featherstone is now (re) employed by the Council on a consultant basis.

This isn't really anything to do with Hereford University … the clue is in the title.

I use fixmystreet.com to log faults as it is independent and outside Council control - I found that ones logged on the Council sometimes 'disappeared' even though they had not been resolved. fixmystreet.com forward them to the Council. I have an RSS stream that shows newly logged faults on their site (for Herefordshire - it covers the whole country). It usually shows a few logged each week, very often reporting failures of recent repairs. Interestingly in the last couple of months there has been a huge increase in reports, just reinforcing the fact that we are at the tipping point of the complete failure of so many of many of our roads. Let's not repeat the propaganda coming out of Plough Lane that the Council have no money. They have a guaranteed income of over £300m a year with a guaranteed inflation proof increase each year. No business has that luxury. We pay some of that, some of it comes from Government and other sources. We pay it on the basis that it will provide the services they say it will, although in reality we have no choice but to pay it.

All these things need planning permission, but I doubt a technicality such as that will get in anyone's way - see Freedom Church ...

It's Kath Greenow and she was writing on behalf of the Lower Bullingham Parish Council, not as an individual. That said, a very lame 30 word objection. Did they read the several hundred pages of the design statement and supporting documents before coming to their conclusion?

I read those minutes - the ref to £200k was ambiguous. For sure it will cost way more than that to build, so is this just fees? As for ongoing maintenance - ha, we all know that the Council do not maintain any of their assets, ever, despite taking the money for doing so. I expect this to be no different.

It's not private money - it's public money via local and central government, safely held in an 'arms length' arrangement so that the pesky public do not have access to information. The Hereford Enterprise Zone is part of the Marches LEP, and even the minutes of meetings of the LEP are now being redacted. As the Leader of Herefordshire Council sits on the Board of the LEP, it's fair to say that it has everything to do with the Council.