A council boss has faced questions over a controversial unfinished housing project in Newcastle after a builder had to be stripped of a multi-million pound contract.
Newcastle City Council cancelled a deal with Orca LGS Solutions last October over 14 homes in Gosforth and Throckley, amid worries about the North Shields firm not completing the scheme on time or on budget. There were calls for an investigation as controversy emerged over the company’s links to city council Labour leader Nick Kemp, who had previously lobbied the local authority on Orca’s behalf and was its “Director of New Business and Housing Strategy”.
Orca was awarded the contract without any competitive bidding process and was paid more than £2m for the incomplete works in Aln Crescent and Broomy Hill Road, which the council said last November represented the entire value of the contract first awarded in 2019 and would not be clawed back – with the housebuilder now understood to have entered insolvency. In an hour-long interrogation by a scrutiny panel on Thursday, civic centre director Michelle Percy told councillors that every development contained risk and that she would be be “really saddened if there was reputational damage” to the council from a scheme which “would have worked but for lots of different reasons that were out of our control”.
