Rowley Regis Town Deal: £19 Million, Three People and a Spreadsheet That Doesn’t Quite Agree With Itself
There are some council reports where you need a calculator.
There are others where you need a calculator, a magnifying glass, three cups of tea and perhaps somebody from Bletchley Park.
The latest Rowley Regis Town Deal Board papers are edging towards the latter category.
The Board meets virtually on Thursday 10 September 2026, overseeing a Towns Fund programme originally worth £19 million. The projects themselves include some perfectly worthwhile things: parks, pathways, Blackheath town centre improvements, the Cradley Heath Skills Campus and improved walking and cycling links.
My concern is not that these schemes shouldn't exist.
It is much simpler:
If we are spending millions of pounds of public money, surely the public financial reports should agree with themselves?
At the moment, several don't.
First, the good news
Let's be fair.
There are some significant achievements recorded in these papers.
The Cradley Heath Skills Campus is built and operating. Parks have been improved. Britannia Park has secured a Green Flag Award. The Canal Network Connectivity project reports pedestrian and cycling improvements. Blackheath has received major public-realm investment. Various employment, tree-planting and accessibility targets are reported as achieved or exceeded.
So this isn't one of those blogs where I am going to pretend absolutely nothing has happened.
It clearly has.
But delivering projects is only half the job.
The other half is being able to demonstrate clearly what was promised, what was spent, what changed, what was achieved and where the remaining money went.
And that is where things become rather more interesting.
£19 million – but which numbers are we using today?
The headline financial position is reasonably straightforward.
The September report says:
Original Towns Fund allocation: £19,000,000
Current approved programme: £18,567,050.42
Spend by 30 June 2026: £17,657,907.63
Remaining approved expenditure: £909,142.79
Underspend against the original £19m: £432,949.58
So far, so good. Those numbers actually add up.
Then you start turning the pages.
And the calculator begins quietly sobbing.
Blackheath: nearly a million pounds disappears between pages
Let's take Blackheath Bus Interchange, Public Realm and CCTV.
Page 43 tells us:
Project Value: £2,901,895
and:
Towns Fund: £2,901,895.
Except the financial table on exactly the same page appears to total:
£2,904,895.
So we've already found £3,000 wandering about unattended.
But turn to the Town Level Financial Profile on page 53 and Blackheath's current project total appears as approximately:
£1,926,945.42.
That is a difference approaching £1 million from the figure displayed only ten pages earlier.
Now, there may be a completely legitimate explanation.
Projects change. Savings arise. Budgets are reprofiled. Money gets formally reallocated.
Fine.
But if that is what happened, show us the bridge between the numbers.
Original budget → expenditure → saving → Board decision → reallocation → revised budget.
That isn't unreasonable.
It's basic financial transparency.
At present the public is left playing regeneration Sudoku.
Parks: pick a number, any number
The Rowley Regis Parks Improvement project doesn't make things much easier.
Page 34 reports:
Project value – £2,874,000
with:
£80,199.70 match funding
and:
£2,793,800 Towns Fund.
Turn the page and suddenly we have:
Project value – £3,237,732.24
Match funding – £363,732.24
Towns Fund – £2,874,000.
Then the Town Level Financial Profile on page 53 apparently gives the project a total of:
£3,204,000.
Three presentations.
Three different financial pictures.
One programme.
Perhaps all three can be reconciled.
But the report doesn't do it for us.
And frankly, it shouldn't require Sherlock Holmes, Poirot and the bloke off The Chase to work out the current approved budget for a council regeneration project.
Rowley Regis Connected joins the numerical party
Then there is Rowley Regis Connected.
Depending upon which part of the document you are looking at, figures around the project include:
£1.5 million
£1.624104 million
approximately £1.620923 million
and the Town Level Financial Profile appears to show approximately:
£1.865076 million.
Again, perhaps every figure has a perfectly reasonable explanation.
If so, wonderful.
Put that explanation in the public report.
Because the purpose of public monitoring shouldn't merely be that the Council knows what the numbers mean.
The public should be able to understand them too.
And remember those mysterious £XXs?
At the special Board meeting on 16 July, several further schemes were approved using programme underspend.
These included:
Haden Hill Pathway Improvements
Haden Hill Adventure Play
Cornfields Play Park
Blackheath Town Centre CCTV
further Wrights Lane works.
But when the minutes were published, several actual financial amounts had mysteriously transformed into:
“£XX”.
Very useful.
Imagine doing your household accounts like that.
Mortgage: £XX.
Electricity: £XX.
Tesco: £XX.
Money left until payday: best not think about it.
For a Board making decisions involving public regeneration funding, the approved amounts should appear clearly in the public decision record unless there is a lawful and clearly explained reason why they cannot.
Three people could potentially make the decisions
Then there is the question of quorum.
This one is worth paying attention to.
In June, four Board members attended a meeting.
The minutes specifically record that the Board was inquorate, meaning it couldn't make certain decisions about project closure and underspend.
At the July meeting the Board changed its Terms of Reference.
Instead of a fixed number, quorum became 25% of the Board membership.
The September agenda lists 12 Board members.
Twenty-five per cent of twelve is:
Three.
So unless there is another rule hidden elsewhere in the Terms of Reference, it appears that three members could potentially constitute a quorate meeting of a Board overseeing a multi-million-pound regeneration programme.
That doesn't automatically make the decision wrong.
But it certainly deserves explaining.
Why 25%?
What was the previous threshold?
Which comparable regeneration boards use 25%?
Is there any requirement that business, community, political or public-sector representatives are present?
Could three people genuinely approve significant changes to programme spending?
These are governance questions, not conspiracy theories.
CCTV complete... except apparently it isn't
Blackheath CCTV produces another little head-scratcher.
At the July meeting the Board approved plans for a 15-camera CCTV system linked into the Roway Lane control room.
Interestingly, when a question was asked about increased anti-social behaviour, members were told that the relevant ASB information would need to come from the ASB Team.
I would have thought the evidence came before approving the investment rather than afterwards, but there we are.
The September report then says:
“CCTV – works being costed and waiting for start date.”
Fair enough.
Except elsewhere in the same Blackheath project report it says:
“Project expenditure and outputs are all complete.”
And:
“Current challenges – None.”
Well, which is it?
If the CCTV is still being costed and hasn't started, how are the project's expenditure and outputs all complete?
Perhaps the CCTV is technically a new extension financed from underspend.
Again, that may be the explanation.
But that distinction should be crystal clear.
The project finished last November... and remains “ongoing”
There is another curiosity.
The Blackheath project page gives an:
End date: November 2025
but in September 2026 still reports:
Status: Ongoing – On track.
Similarly, Rowley Regis Connected records an end date of March 2025 while still being described as ongoing in this September 2026 monitoring pack.
Maybe project extensions explain that.
If so, update the dates.
Public reports should show the programme that actually exists today, not the programme that existed three templates ago.
April–June? July–September? October–December?
This is perhaps my favourite bit.
The agenda describes the project reporting as covering:
July–September.
The presentation title says:
“Reporting Period July–September 2026.”
The formal officer report says it covers:
1 April 2026 to 30 June 2026.
And then the financial section introduces itself as:
“Summary of the October to December Monitoring Returns.”
Excellent.
Three reporting periods for the price of one.
I am fairly confident we haven't yet invented a calendar where April, July and October all happen simultaneously.
This looks like straightforward document-control or template-copying problems.
But that's precisely the point.
When a document is being relied upon to monitor millions of pounds, somebody ought to be checking the final version before it goes out.
Apparently May is still in the future too
The report also states that the next government submission was to be uploaded by:
28 May 2026.
The Board meeting is on 10 September 2026.
Unless Sandwell Council has acquired a flux capacitor as part of the Town Deal programme, May has already happened.
Again, harmless typo?
Probably.
But there are rather a lot of harmless errors gathering in one document.
The Canal numbers need checking before anybody closes the project
The Canal Network Connectivity project is particularly important because formal closure has already been delayed while evaluation information is completed.
Yet the September pack seems to contain two different versions of the pedestrian and cycling outcome figures.
Page 18 gives a grand total of:
440,304
while page 19 gives:
218,134.
Those are not rounding differences.
That is a difference of more than 222,000.
And when closure has specifically been delayed so that output and evaluation evidence can be checked, surely the first task should be establishing which figure is actually right.
The Skills Campus deserves credit – but the monitoring needs explaining
There is much to welcome about the £9.3m Cradley Heath Skills Campus.
The June meeting heard that 325 adults were using the centre and that there had already been significant SEND participation.
The latest report says 294 adult 19+ enrolments took place during the 2025/26 academic year.
Those may be different measures, which is fine.
But the formal Towns Fund output table says:
Learners/trainees/students enrolled
Target: 475
Actual achieved: 0.
The overall Town Deal summary also records zero.
So how can we simultaneously have hundreds of learners using or enrolled at the Campus while the monitored output remains zero?
There will probably be a technical reporting explanation.
Let's have it.
The same applies to High Needs/SEND places.
This is exactly the sort of information residents need to understand because SEND provision across Sandwell remains an enormous issue.
1,393 trees from a target of... 100 or 150?
Here's another smaller example.
The parks project page gives a tree-planting target of:
150
with 1,393 achieved.
Excellent result.
But the Town Level summary gives the target as:
100, again with 1,393 achieved.
Either way, planting 1,393 trees is clearly well above target.
But which target was actually approved?
100?
150?
Both apparently.
And apparently cycling has gone through the roof
The Rowley Regis Connected measures aimed to increase cycling trips from 163 to 450 per day.
The latest table reports:
3,731.
If that genuinely represents 3,731 daily cycling trips, that is extraordinary and deserves celebrating.
But it also deserves explaining.
Was that a daily average?
A cumulative counter reading?
A survey-period total?
Which routes?
What methodology?
If we have increased cycling from 163 to nearly 4,000 journeys a day, somebody should probably tell the rest of the country how Sandwell did it.
Pride in Place is beginning to appear around the edges too
There is another issue I want residents to watch carefully.
The September agenda contains an item specifically discussing Blackheath market loading bays and possible Pride in Place funding.
Elsewhere the parks report says officers are also looking at obtaining Pride in Place funding for street lighting.
There is nothing inherently wrong with using different funding programmes together.
Sometimes that makes perfect sense.
But the funding streams need to remain transparent.
Residents should be able to see whether something is being paid for from:
the original Town Deal;
Town Deal underspend;
Council mainstream budgets;
Highways funding;
match funding;
UKSPF;
Section 106;
or Pride in Place.
Otherwise one pot slowly merges into another and eventually nobody outside the building can tell which programme paid for what.
A word about Reform
It is important to be fair here.
Much of the Rowley Regis Town Deal programme was designed, approved and substantially delivered before Reform took control of Sandwell Council in May 2026.
These are therefore largely inherited programmes, funding structures and historical decisions.
It would be ridiculous to pretend the current administration designed every spreadsheet or made every decision going back years.
But Reform now runs the Council.
Councillor Ray Nock sits on this Board as Cabinet Member for Regeneration and Economic Growth.
So the current administration now has an opportunity — and responsibility — to insist upon better transparency, cleaner reporting and clearer accountability.
That is precisely the sort of thing Reform told residents would change.
Here is an easy opportunity to demonstrate it.
No grand speech needed.
Just make the numbers add up.
Twelve reasonable questions before Thursday
Before the 10 September meeting, I think the Board should be able to answer some straightforward questions:
1. Does the new 25% quorum genuinely mean three of the twelve members can make decisions?
2. What was the previous quorum and why was it reduced?
3. Can the Board publish one reconciled schedule showing the original £19m allocation, expenditure, underspend, reallocations and current project budgets?
4. Why do the Blackheath financial figures differ by nearly £1m between different parts of the same pack?
5. Why are there several different financial values for the Parks programme?
6. What is the actual approved current budget for Rowley Regis Connected?
7. What were the actual £ figures hidden behind the “£XX” entries in the July minutes?
8. How is Blackheath expenditure described as complete when CCTV is still being costed?
9. Which Canal Network Connectivity outcome figure is correct — 440,304 or 218,134?
10. Why does the Skills Campus report hundreds of learners but formally record zero against its 475 learner target?
11. Why does the report contain three different reporting periods and a government submission deadline already months out of date?
12. What exactly does the reported figure of 3,731 cycling trips represent?
None of these questions accuses anybody of wrongdoing.
They simply ask the Board to explain its own paperwork.
The bottom line
Rowley Regis has received substantial regeneration investment.
Residents should want those projects to succeed.
I certainly do.
But success isn't measured simply by spending money and cutting ribbons.
It is also measured by whether residents can trace what happened to the money, understand the outcomes and trust the information being published.
At the moment, the September Town Deal pack contains too many figures, dates and descriptions that don't comfortably reconcile.
Perhaps every discrepancy has an innocent and perfectly sensible explanation.
If so, brilliant.
Let's hear those explanations and clean up the public record.
Because when you are overseeing a programme that started with £19 million of public money, “it's somewhere in the spreadsheet” really isn't an adequate standard of accountability.
And if the Board has genuinely found a way for April–June, July–September and October–December to occur at the same time, I withdraw my criticism entirely.
They haven't just regenerated Rowley Regis.
They've reinvented time.
#RowleyRegis #Blackheath #CradleyHeath #Sandwell #SandwellCouncil #TownDeal #TownsFund #PublicMoney #Transparency #Accountability #Regeneration #PrideInPlace #LocalGovernment #ReformUK
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