Stray Ferret Focus: How we followed up a reader's tip to learn a lesson about masterplans

Some articles can be written quickly. Others take time — sometimes rather a lot of time.

Welcome to our monthly look at what goes on behind the scenes when we are working on articles at the Stray Ferret. 

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One recent example of this was my investigation into why the council's 10-year masterplan never left the drawing board – 10 years ago. 

Sometimes, it takes a well-informed reader with a good memory to put us on the track of a good story.

When Richard Flinton, chief executive of North Yorkshire Council, said recently that Harrogate hadn’t had a formal investment masterplan for some time, reader Malcolm Margolis was quick to tell us he was wrong.

In fact, said Mr Margolis, a detailed one was drawn up in 2015 and covered the 10 years to 2025.

In other words, had it been pursued, it would still have been in force.

But the Harrogate Town Centre Strategy and Masterplan 2015-25 wasn't pursued, so we took a long look at it and asked some searching questions: what was supposed to change, and why did it never happen?

We won’t go into the details here – you can read the story for yourself.

The masterplan was drawn up and officially adopted by Harrogate Borough Council, which was abolished at the end of March 2023. But some of the people who sat on the council back then are still councillors today, so we asked some of them what happened.

We approached four ex-Harrogate Borough councillors, but three of them couldn’t recall what had derailed the plan. One could, though, and was very helpful. Malcolm Margolis apparently has a better record-keeping system than some of our elected officials and was able to provide us with plenty of valuable information.

It turned out that the answer to the mystery of the masterplan’s fate largely boiled down to money. The strategy was ambitious and so required deep pockets to see it realised, but the funding wasn’t secured and the whole thing was shelved. Or almost the whole thing – one component, the Station Gateway scheme, survives in reduced form.

There was a valuable lesson to be drawn from this episode, which you can read about in the article, but that wouldn’t have been evident without Mr Margolis’ intervention – or the Stray Ferret’s drive to follow it up.

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