Call for City of Culture collapse inquiry blocked

Calls to request a public inquiry into the collapse of the charity which oversaw Coventry's year as UK City of Culture have been blocked by Labour councillors.

The UK City of Culture programme was branded a "juggernaut of incompetence" by Gary Ridley, the Conservative group leader on the city council, as he led calls for the authority to ask the government to hold a public inquiry.

His renewed calls came after a long-running BBC investigation forced documents into the public domain which showed the collapse of Coventry City of Culture Trust was blamed internally on accounting errors and incompetence.

Labour used its majority on the council to vote down the proposal.

There was backing for the motion from the Conservative, Green and Reform groups.

The trust went into administration in 2023, months after it had borrowed £1m of public funds from the city council to plug the gap.

The £1m loan was never paid back and the trust left £4.2m in unpaid debts.

Dozens of staff were also made redundant and a two-year programme to boost the city's cultural scene was scrapped.

Despite the failures, it is claimed Coventry's year as UK City of Culture helped to generate more than £183m for the local economy according to research by former principal partners of the collapsed trust - the University of Warwick and Coventry University.

Councillor Naeem Ahktar, Labour's cabinet member for Communities, pointed to an ongoing investigation by the Charity Commission as a key reason for voting down the Tory proposal. That investigation started in 2023 and there have been no significant updates since.

He also pointed out that the council had already asked the previous Conservative government for an inquiry.

He said: "This council has already taken action. In addition to the council conducting its own review through the scrutiny process, we also wrote to the then secretary of state, Lucy Frazer, requesting that the government commission a public inquiry into the collapse of the City of Culture trust."

He added: "The secretary of state came to the conclusion that the threshold for a public inquiry was not met."

He also pointed out investigations had been concluded by the National Audit Office and the administrator appointed after the collapse.

But Conservative councillors branded the findings of those investigations "useless" due to their narrow parameters.

Ridley highlighted extracts from recently released documents such as meetings of the Trust's executive board, where questions were raised about the possibility of fraud, but members were repeatedly told there was no criminality.

He said: "Does that sound to you like a good model of governance when people are relieved that the word incompetence is being used rather than criminal?"

"We have got a very serious problem with this governance model that has not been addressed. And it needs to be addressed, because if this bug in the system is allowed to continue this can happen again elsewhere.

"It could happen in Bradford, it could happen in the place after that. The whole juggernaut can simply keep rolling on with this level of incompetence going unchallenged."

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