By Herpreet Kaur Grewal
A provisional boss has been hired at a crisis-torn New Deal for Communities regeneration scheme in Nottingham, Regeneration & Renewal has learned.
Nottingham City Council has appointed Stephen Lord, a charity director, as interim chief executive of the Neighbourhood Development Company, which manages the NDC programme in the city’s Radford and Hyson Green districts.
Lord will take over the post of Sam Tarff, who was suspended by the NDC board in 2007 pending an investigation by the partnership. The investigation has been completed, but its results have not been made publicly available.
A report commissioned by the Government Office for the East Midlands (GOEM), and obtained this week by Regeneration & Renewal using Freedom of Information legislation, describes the NDC as “irrevocably damaged” and as having “coalesced into factions”.
A council spokesman confirmed that, without progress, the Government could withdraw the NDC’s remaining £10 million of funding.
The report recommends that the chair of the NDC board, Narinder Sharma, is replaced as chair by a local authority representative.
It says that Sharma did not refer a complaint by a senior NDC manager about “serious concerns” with the board’s then treasurer – including the “alleged non-payment of money owed to the NDC” – to the Standards Committee.
It says that Sharma instead asked the company secretary to carry out an investigation, which did not interview the person who made the complaint and recommended that the treasurer stay in post.
Despite repeated phone calls, emails and a visit by this magazine to the Derby office of the charity that employs him, Sharma declined to comment.
But Mohammed Azim, co-opted board director of the NDC, said: “Narinder Sharma is a very good independent chair and did a lot of good work for the NDC.”
In a statement, the NDC said that its board, the council and GOEM had agreed in principle to implement all the review’s recommendations.