W. Paul Reeve

They have the qualifications to recognise organisational failure.

Now, whether this is groupthink or simply ineffective oversight, the council has normalised failure.

The Chief Executive, Paul Reeves, joined in January 2025, and I linked to that this morning, and he inherited long-standing problems.

It is he who now owns the responsibility for delivering the promised turnaround.

There are plans and dated milestones, yet July's risk papers, their board papers, which I linked to this morning, still carry a safeguarding plan delivery date marked January.

Like they thought they wanted to climb inside in the winter months.

But then there were two, uh, visionary climbers, Jerry Moffat and Paul Reeve, uh, from Sheffield, and inspired by early experimental climbing walls in Belgium, and I think there were a couple in Hong Kong too.

They started looking around Sheffield for a building to, you know, scale up these boards into something like that people could actually go to and climb proper heights.

And luckily for climbers, and unluckily for most other people in Sheffield, it was late 1980s, you know, post-Thatcherite Britain, so Sheffield was full of massive disused industrial buildings that were being sold dirt cheap, you know, with the end of the steel industry and a lot of other industry in the area.