The true extent of the latest scandal from the local council is horrifying.

Last week a report was published highlighting several rule breaks from Ashfield District Council in relation to the Automated Distribution and Manufacturing Centre (ADMC) and the Ashfield Innovation and Technology Park (AITP) projects opposite Sutton Parkway train station on Lowmoor Road.

The flagship Automated Distribution and Manufacturing Centre is set to create 1000 jobs.

It has emerged that £5 million worth of work has been carried out on the site that breach procurement rules and financial regulations. This is because work began on this project last year despite the fact the contracts for the works have still yet to be finalised.

The quantity surveyor work has also been done, which has again been carried out without the contract being finalised.

The costs of the project have also ballooned due to the fact that Ashfield District Council did not seek the approval from Nottinghamshire County Council for the cost of the highways works associated with the projects. This has meant that the costs of these works were vastly undervalued, and have now risen from £1.5million to £10million.

This has left a budget gap in the projects of £7.7million which Ashfield District Council will now somehow have to find a way to fill.

Ashfield District Council says that all work on the site was suspended on 9 January 2026 when these facts came to light. So now the project faces another delay by another year, after it has already faced significant delays.

The purchase of land from Nottinghamshire County Council was completed in January 2025 and construction work was originally set to take around a year, but a delay announced later in 2025 meant the project was not set to be finished until the end of 2026.

These rule breaches now mean that the project might not end up being finished until late 2027 and Ashfield District Council has had to ask the Government for a deadline extension.

Most of the money being used to fund these projects is Government investment from the Towns Fund that Lee Anderson MP secured for Ashfield in the last Parliament. To see this money wasted through reckless action and repeated rule breaking by Ashfield District Council is scandalous, and a total insult to the people of Ashfield.

At the very best, this is serial incompetence from the Council on an astronomical scale. I now expect nothing short of a full and thorough, independent investigation into exactly how this has happened.

But this is far from the first time that Ashfield District Council has been totally irresponsible with taxpayers' money. It seems that the people of Ashfield cannot trust the Ashfield Independent-led Council in charge of their money. The ever-increasing list of evidence backs this up.

To that end, Lee Anderson has written directly to Jason Zadrozny, the Leader of Ashfield District Council, as well as to the Chief Executive of the Council to raise my serious concerns over this situation, demand assurances that the contract allocation process has been done fairly, and to ask if Ashfield District Council can be trusted at all with public money.