Taxpayers still have more than £15 million to pay off of the contract to build and run the Jubilee Library, in Brighton.
Since 2004, Brighton and Hove City Council has paid nearly £48 million for the flagship library to NU Library for Brighton Limited, including the book fund, cleaning, maintenance and security.
The 25-year contract runs until Tuesday 20 November 2029 when ownership of the library will transfer to the council if the remaining £15.52 million balance has been paid off.
Councillors raised the imminent end of the PFI contact during discussions about the future of Hollingbury, Rottingdean and Westdene libraries – all threatened with closure to save money.
At the council’s People Overview and Scrutiny Committee meeting on Monday 10 November, Green councillor Sue Shanks called for a pause in the process to allows for discussions about the end of the PFI contract in four years. The committee backed her suggestion.
The council’s director of commissioning and communities Anna Gianfrancesco told the committee that the council was formulating a libraries strategy for the end of the PFI deal but had not done so yet.
Labour councillor Alan Robins, the council’s cabinet member for sports, recreation and libraries, said: “PFI contracts are a helpful way for councils to spread the cost of large projects over a number of years rather than having to find the total cost upfront.
“They often allow councils to go ahead with important projects which otherwise would not be financially viable.
“Our Jubilee Library PFI scheme is jointly funded by the council and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. But once the PFI contract ends, the government grant will also end.
“At that point, the full ongoing cost of running the library, including its book fund and digital services, will be the sole responsibility of the council.
“As a result, we are not expecting any savings once the remaining balance has been paid and the PFI deal ended because the grant funding will also end at this time.”
Old form of PFI with a balloon payment at the end.
Similar to car lease with option to buy vehicle at end of surrender but continue lease on new vehicle but obviously no new library available to transfer debt through.
The waste and recycling PFI ends 2032 that will have a huge balloon payment due so we can own a use sorting facility in Hollingdean and an incinerator which by 2032 will very likely not be compliant with energy recovery regulations.
Shit show continues
On the waste PFI, the last figure I saw was in 2024, at that point Brighton and Hove City Council still owed about £158 million. It was always a poor deal for the city and shocking that the council ignored community opposition decades ago to saddled us with such a large amount of debt, and poor contract terms – terms which actually hindered the city recycling more materials for years and years.
Cllr Alan Robins can try and ignore the reality, but while borrowing to build can be a good thing and have its place, a lot of the New Labour PFI schemes have not stood the test of time and are recognised for the poor value they were. For PFI geeks out there, Private Eye did a deep dive into the pitfalls of PFI: https://www.private-eye.co.uk/pictures/special_reports/pf-eye.pdf
Unfortunately more and more of council tax is needed to pay the Councils lavish pensions, I imagine in 20 years all of our payments will directly pay those gold plated schemes with nothing left over for services.
How much is the Council having to pay for ‘lavish pensions’? I imagine you must know, or you wouldn’t have made the claim.
Don’t forget the undisclosed golden hellos and goodbyes for the rinse and repeat top earning Council Officers. CEO Ms Gibbons earns a salary £20k more than the Prime Minister at £190k – said to be worth up to £220k as a package including pension and other benefits. Even more outlandishly the salary for BHCC Executive Director of Health and Adult Social Care appears to have jumped from £123,213 in 2023 to the current £465,821.
A full indepenedent audit of all council salaries, perks, pensions, expenses and allowances is needed before another single cut to public services is made.
Here are the published salaries of all directors of BHCC services:
https://www.brighton-hove.gov.uk/council-and-democracy/council-data-and-finance/senior-officers-pay-2025#:~:text=All%20of%20our%20senior%20Homes%20and%20Adult,role%2C%20and%20our%20Director%20of%20Housing%20People
Brighton and Hove gets a mention here. https://www.taxpayersalliance.com/town_hall_rich_list_2025_record_3_906_council_bosses_received_over_100_000_last_year
BHCC gets a number of mentions but without specific references to why the then Director of Health and Adult Social Care would have received a compensation payment of £307k in February 2024, to add to their £125k salary. It would be nice if the Taxpayers Alliance could explain the compensation payment, but they haven’t. To be exact, the salary was about £125k with an additional unexplained payment of £307k, according to the report.
Paul. 3/4 of the council budget gets blown paying for care. Be it OAPs, mentally disabled, or children born from the massive junkie community we enjoy here.
That’s what the money gets spent on.
From your tone, I take it you want bin men and teachers to not have pensions?
No one’s council tax is used to pay for the councils LGPS pensions, People who are currently contributing to the fund is what’s pays for the pension benefit’s,
Contrast this with the fact BHCC was able to borrow £37m from the Public Works Loan Board at a preferrential rate to lend to the private enterprise and white elephant of the i360 – surely unlawful???
So why didn’t BHCC use the PWLB at preferential interest rates to fund a new central Library – though many of us preferred it sited in the Dome – rather than putting the whole Library network in hock for 25 years, causing branch Libraries to close as the PFI debt hoovered up nearly half the yearly Libraries budget?
Now it appears the current Labour council intend to use this outrageous debt as an excuse to continue to beat and close other city Libraries.
Extraordarily, one of the former Council Officers resposible for the Jubilee Library PFI scandal was awarded an OBE – for services to Libraries!
Services to close Libraries would be nearer the truth. There should have been punishment rather than reward.
If you’re going to slander former council staff, make sure you get your facts right. It wasn’t an OBE, and no libraries closed on their watch. But please continue with your moronic and inaccurate jibes.
JamesK may have got the name of the bauble wrong but he is right about it being undeserved. Plunging city libraries into debt for 25 years is nothing to be celebrated for. Plus this individual did not lift a finger to save Hove Library when it was under repeated threat from Labour. It was the residents who saved Hove Library more than once.
Remember when councils used to have savings and a long-term strategy for replacing old utilities. It was called financial planning. We had a Borough Engineer, Surveyor and Treasurer. Now we have a myriad of officials with different titles who play pass the buck with different budgets. Is this really progress?
Blame central government which holds the purse strings. Councils are given no powers to raise any funding locally, so are reduced to bidding for the pots of money that are made available to them for central government priorities, instead of the needs of their residents.
Westminster is very shortsighted in being so controlling over LA funding. Legally mandated care services are now consuming the majority of most councils’ budgets leaving an ever dwindling slice to fund the services most of us care about, like libraries and bins. Soon even the best run councils will be declaring bankruptcy. All this is leading to huge dissatisfaction with government and increasing support for populism.
Well it was the Labour government under Tony Blair who championed PFI and saddled councils up and down the country with PFI debt, and the current Labour government who are trying to bring it back.
Alongside the 14 years of Tory austerity and their cuts to council budgets which decimated many services, it should not be a mystery why our communities are crumbling. Tories essentially refused to pay for local services and imposed savage cuts. Labour’s answer is to still not properly fund local councils, but like schemes like PFI, to find alternative funding streams and be blinkered about the potential longer term financial impacts of proper investment in public services, and the damage their ‘initiatives’ and higher cost borrowing has.
In Hamlet there is the line “neither a borrower nor a lender be”. It makes sense that all governments, local or central, should not borrow to invest, but should save a proportion of their income into an investment fund, out of which they use the money to build homes, leisure centres, libraries and the like. Too late for those PFI agreements we are already entangled in, but we should save for the future, not borrow.
The PUBLIC WORKS LOAN BOARD originated in 1793.
Not really any excuses for the Council not having heard of it when Jubilee Library was planned.
True. But the government of the time was pushing PFI over the PWLB as, according to things I have read, it ‘in theory’ put the risk onto the private sector and took the investment cost off the government balance sheet. I don’t know that the then BHCC had much choice in the matter.
Councils always had a choice with PFI. In Jubilee Library’s case, this was a disastrous BHCC decision damaging the rest of the Brighton and Hove Library network for 25 years when PWLB money was available to them at a fraction of the cost and that is what it exists for. Heads should have rolled. Not been awarded an OBE.
Quote from Council Leader Sankey spotted in today’s Daily Express.
Why is she trying to close city Libraries and reduce their opening hours then?
Bella Sankey, leader of the Labour-run Brighton Council said that the areas libraries “have been recognised as Libraries of Sanctuary”, a nationwide scheme that sees library staff welcoming refugees and people seeking sanctuary.
She added that this was “something we are very proud of and keen to maintain”.
https://www.express.co.uk/news/politics/2137806/anti-racist-union-jack-display-cancelled-brighton-council-offence