Sunday Newsletter
Albion Street: the £3.2m estimate is only part of the story
This week WATCH has concentrated on one of Adur’s most serious unresolved public-housing failures: Albion Street in Southwick.
The council’s own records establish substantial defects, 49 unavailable homes and millions of pounds in additional estimated costs. What they do not yet establish is the final bill, the complete decision trail or where responsibility ultimately lies.
Albion Street: what the records establish
Verified facts: Adur’s July 2026 committee report says all 49 homes remain unavailable for occupation and that water ingress was identified in 25 of them.
The report gives an additional cost estimate of £3.2 million:
£2.1 million construction costs
£400,000 professional costs
£700,000 capitalised interest
That is an estimate of increased costs—not the total cost of the development and not money already spent. Read the council’s July report.
The same report records £1.3 million of capital expenditure in the previous financial year, including £698,000 of capitalised interest. It also refers to an anticipated £998,000 recovery through an insolvency bond.
Unresolved: WATCH has not yet seen evidence confirming that the £998,000 was received.
The council attributes significant problems to weatherproofing, materials and construction details. It says original contractor Westridge entered administration and that completion contractor Cheesmur is not responsible for work undertaken before its appointment. Those are the council’s recorded positions; they are not a final independent allocation of liability.
Following the money without inventing a total
WATCH has consolidated 30 published council-expenditure files and reconstructed relevant Westridge, Cheesmur and consultant payment trails.
That work has produced useful leads—but the rows are not consistently project-labelled, and the data include entries that may be corrections or reversals. We will therefore not present a supplier total as Albion Street expenditure until project attribution and duplication have been properly resolved.
The council’s contract register separately records a £1,739,438 excluding VAT completion contract with Cheesmur. That contract value cannot simply be added to every budget approval or expenditure figure: some amounts may overlap.
Eighteen months of continuous Adur expenditure data remain missing from the dataset currently held by WATCH. The final outturn, original Westridge contract value, variations, professional fees, rental loss and recovery receipts are still not established.
The promised accountability report
On 2 July, Adur council leader Jeremy Gardner said there would be a full report for him and the public into how the Albion Street situation arose.
WATCH contacted him on 17 September asking about that commitment. No substantive reply has been supplied to WATCH for publication.
The Joint Strategic Committee meets again on Tuesday 6 October. WATCH will check whether the promised accountability or lessons-learned report appears in the meeting papers. The July remediation report explains the current defects and proposed funding response; it is not necessarily the promised report into how the situation developed.
Queen’s Park: result verified
Green candidate Mark Strong won the Queen’s Park by-election on 24 September with 1,139 votes.
The remaining result was:
Steve Gladwin, Labour — 802
John Shepherd, Reform UK — 160
Stefan Sönke Speckesser, Conservative — 97
Rüdiger Dikty-Daudiyan, Liberal Democrat — 74
Turnout was 33.36%.
WATCH’s pre-election record will now become a commitment tracker for Councillor Strong. Candidate statements will remain attributed, and election victory will not be treated as proof that any individual policy claim was correct.
A new public-money lead: environmental enforcement
Adur and Worthing’s forward plan now lists a key decision titled “Environmental Enforcement Contract Extension.” The notice categorises it as the letting or re-letting of a contract worth more than £100,000.
That makes the existing NES enforcement case active again—but it is not yet a finding.
WATCH still needs the decision report, supplier identity, extension term, contract value, trial-performance evidence, complaint record and financial arrangements before assessing effectiveness or value for money.
What WATCH is waiting for
Key dates in the current evidence queue include:
28 September: authority-stated response dates for the West Sussex Growth Deals and Growing Sussex 5G requests.
1 October: Brighton and Hove’s expected response date for the Sussex bus-reform records.
6 October: Adur and Worthing Joint Strategic Committee; WATCH will check for the Albion Street accountability report.
7 October: council-stated date for the Southwick and Shoreham Harbour odour records.
14 October: expected response date for the Southwick EV-chargepoint request.
These dates are evidence checkpoints, not assumptions that complete disclosures will arrive.
Credit where due
All five Queen’s Park candidates placed substantive answers into the public record through the common external candidate-question series.
Four attended the 17 September hustings, while Rüdiger Dikty-Daudiyan supplied written answers and was the only candidate to return WATCH’s full questionnaire. Recording that participation does not imply endorsement of any candidate or claim.
What changed because we asked?
No new policy, spending decision or correction can yet be attributed to WATCH this week.
Acknowledgements, decision notices and events occurring after an enquiry do not by themselves prove that WATCH caused a change. We will claim impact only where the evidence supports it.
Next week our main work remains the Albion Street documentary reconstruction: what was approved, what was paid, what warnings were recorded, what recovery has actually occurred and when the public will receive the promised account of how the project reached this position.
Independent. Non-party. Evidence first.