Cotswold Life Editor’s Blog: The Water Parks scandal

There can be no doubt that Gloucestershire County Council, Cotswold District Council and other parties have hardly covered themselves in glory when it comes to murky depths of the Cotswold Water Parks scandal.

This fantastic regional asset, bigger in area than the Norfolk Broads, should be a cause for celebration, rather than recrimination. But trawl though the history and you'll dredge up ineptitude, corruption and fraud on an epic local scale.

It is still something of a mystery how the 85-acre Keynes Country Park, which was let by the county council for a peppercorn rent as a local amenity, then went on to be sub-let by the original Water Park society to a property developer. It is an even bigger mystery as to how chief executive Dennis Grant, recently jailed for four years for fraud, managed to steal £600,000 to fund his lavish lifestyle without any of the original trustees noticing. Weren't they there to check on these things?

And then there's the fact that both councils, the police and our MP seemingly ignored early warning calls from local people and failed to launch an investigation; an ongoing concern over who authorised what seems to be unlawful landfill dumping at Lake 31; and worries about the make-up of CDC's own investigation into the affair which, at the time of writing, is to be chaired by a councillor with commercial links to one of Dennis Grant's companies.

Surely what is needed is an independent inquiry into the whole sorry mess? I know it would cost a great deal of council taxpayers' money, but allowing the Conservative administration to investigate itself is never going to draw a line under this mess, especially in a constituency where the sitting MP fiddled his expenses to the tune of £66,000 yet was still re-elected with an increased majority.

Are you happy with that? I can't say that I am. Now I'm not saying that our local politics is institutionally corrupt, but I am suggesting that it's institutionally arrogant.

But while these questions really do need answering, for the new board of trustees it is time to move on. More than 13,000 people work within the Water Park for over 850 businesses. The area attracts more than 500,000 visitors a year, bringing huge financial benefit to the region. Those people need to be able to get on with their jobs and their lives without the stench of corruption swirling around them. And that is why our chief writer, Katie Jarvis, has spoken to the new trustees about the way forward, while still acknowledging the problems of the past. It's a cracking read in our October issue, I commend it to you.