West Norfolk Council spending £1.17m on new vehicles

Officers have warned that several maintenance vehicles need to be “urgently” replaced to ensure a council’s services can continue unaffected.

West Norfolk Council’s independent-controlled cabinet has been told it needs to spend £1.17m to replace four cage trucks, a van, street-cleaning vehicles and two tractors.

Engineers recently inspected the council’s fleet and found the equipment had begun to fail this month.

Officers issued a “special urgency notice” to ensure the cash for the replacement vehicles can be approved as soon as possible to avoid services being halted.

Councillor Jo Rust said she had “concerns” that “something so integral to the services we carry out has come forward as urgent business”.

Approving the cash had been made complicated due to the council’s budget policy, which uses a tier system to identify what it needs to spend its capital cash on.

It means there are additional steps that needed to be taken before the financing of the new vehicles could move forward.

“This is an unintended consequence of our desire to scrutinise,” deputy leader Simon Ring noted.

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