Can I interest him in some invisible magic beans?

Lib Dem Group Leader Tim Prater spoke out at the Folkestone and Hythe Cabinet meeting on 22 February on the possibility of selling Princes Parade to a developer.

Tim was speaking against the proposal to allow officers to look into the bid which had been received. Tim made the case that the proposal could leave the site in limbo for years as a developer tried to save money on remdiation works and swimming pool build quality. At the end of the debate, Cabinet ignored Cllr Prater, voting for the proplsa by 7-2 (Tim Prater and Lesley Whybrown voted against).

Tim said:

"In December on report C/22/73 we accepted that the net cost to this Council, to deliver Princes Parade with the level of remediation deemed sufficient, and a Leisure centre at the agreed standard, was somewhere over £10m.

"After the sale of the site Princes Parade and South Road swimming pool site to Sunningdale, after including in CiL and S106 monies, this Council would still need to borrow £10.7m on the figures in December.

"Sunningdale in that report offered to increase their payment by £5m, but not to be paid for another 3 years. That would, of all other things remained equal, drop the debt requirement to around £6m, but you are always concerned with a sale when cash is not paid up front. Sometimes, things go wrong. Risk, innit?

"In February, we receive a new offer, as detailed in the report. Cabinet have been told the bidder, and the amount, but for commercial reasons, which are reasonable, we are not allowed to say who.

"In order to keep this debate in public at this moment and not in closed session I’m not going to refer to the bidder by name, or the price offered.

"However that bidder is essentially offering to buy the sites and do the remediation works and build and hand-over a swimming pool.

"The bid would give a capital receipt to the Council – they are not offering nothing – and instead of ending up £11m, or £6m in debt, we end up in profit.

"I’m told the leader is interested. On that basis, can I interest him in some invisible magic beans I have for sale? You can’t see them, feel them or smell them, but they are definitely at least as reasonable an idea of this sale.

"The premise here is that the bidder can deliver the same level of remediation to the site, the same scale of leisure centre, the same amount of development, the same amount of open space, the same road re-routing for at least £11m less that the Council thought they could based on the original Sunningdale £20m purchase price.

"And actually the bidder has made no reference to the significant S106 money and CiL money that was going to be added in by the Council. Perhaps they think they can do it without those too? So maybe £13-15m cheaper than the Council had projected.

"Those projections were built after YEARS of work with officers, consultants, contractors. BAM had been repeatedly asked for savings, and came back with some “value engineering proposals” that may have shaved off £153,000, or maybe up to £1.6m if we accepted design changes that would “need referral back to Planning and, in some instances, would potentially diminish the final build quality.”

"But the bidder proposes we sell them the site, and they can deliver it around £15m cheaper, let alone their extra costs of borrowing and profit on that borrowing, where we can’t?

If you even vaguely consider this offer to be realistic, you are damning the work of all officers, consultants and contractors to this Council on this project for at least the last four years.

"Now, I have some record in damning officers, consultants and contracts on this project, but wouldn’t for a second suggest that the price they have come to INFLATES the cost of delivery by £15m.

"Are you seriously saying they have? Because in even considering pursuing this bid, that is essentially the message you are sending: our costs were out by a third.

"If something looks too good to be true, it is. This is not a realistic offer, but introduces a whole new world of pain to this Council.

"Because the only way you could deliver cost savings of that sort is if your remediation was massively lower quality, or your build quality much lower, or you built many more houses, or you didn’t build a leisure centre at all.

"And with the site in a third party's ownership, they would be working through those options for years to come. Sit on the site. Revised planning application. Revise the S106 agreements. Launch challenges on contracts, design, quality, build: anything to make the numbers add up.

"They can wait. They now own the site.

"All control: gone. All vision: surrendered. All credibility: sold.

"Please: save your officers some time. This is not a credible offer. Don’t waste their time. Don’t waste our time. Vote to take no further action on this."