A SENIOR councillor has defended the £15,000 commissioning of a sculpture which is being installed outside an iconic building.

The Baby of the North, the work of Haworth sculptor Craig Dyson, will provide a focal point at the refurbished Margaret McMillan Tower in Bradford – formerly the Central Library.

Opposition groups at Bradford Council have condemned the spending on the piece and the £9 million-plus forked out to convert the building into council offices.

The Labour-led authority – which said the conversion project aimed to save money in the long run by reducing the authority’s reliance on leased buildings – had already faced fierce criticism for fitting colour-changing lights on the top of the building at a cost to the taxpayer of £13,000.

Tory leader Simon Cooke, a Bingley Rural councillor, says: "You can defend investing in an office block and the ‘spend to save’ strategy, but when you have £13,000 on red lights and £15,000 on a statue, and when you go in the conference room and there isn’t even a PA system, it’s not only been an enormously expensive project but actually it’s not achieving what Bradford Council needs.”

Cllr Cooke said he understood money set aside for capital projects could not be spent on services, but said there were still better uses for capital funding, such as improving roads or schools.

He said: “There’s a whole pile of things we could have spent this money on.”

Councillor Jeanette Sunderland, leader of the Liberal Democrat group, said: “Even now, they continue to spend money without even any concern about what it looks like to the public. They have got brand new offices all over the place.

“I am speechless that in a city where so many children don’t do well at school, that so many people and their families are struggling, we continue to spend on these sorts of projects.”

But the council’s deputy leader, Councillor Val Slater, defended the spending.

She said: “That was an empty building that was costing us an awful lot of money to maintain. We no longer have that maintenance."

Cllr Slater said the sculpture had been jointly funded by the council and the Government through the Regional Growth Fund.

She added the decision to commission the piece had been taken some years ago, and its location outside the Margaret McMillan building was chosen later.

Cllr Slater said: “If we were taking decisions in the current climate, we may have come up with a different direction, but having started doing work, you can’t just pull the plug.

“It will get people talking about and thinking about art. Even in times of austerity I think art and having things people can appreciate – or not, as the case may be – is as important.”

Mr Dyson, 26, began work on the sculpture project about a year ago.

A series of workshops was held to gather ideas from the public.

The finished piece – which stands 3.5 metres high on its plinth – includes hundreds of Victorian loom components, many of which originated in Haworth mills.

"It has been a huge project that has involved hundreds of people in the community – to create a sculpture that means something to them and to just get them involved in something that is going to be a public piece," he said.

"The bottom line is it’s an easy target.

"The other thing is, I donated a lot of my own material to this project because I thought that it was worth it, material I have been collecting since I was a lad."

The sculpture is due to be unveiled at 2pm on Saturday (May 21).