City creatives who want the chance to buy New England House are questioning what happened to a £4.9 million government grant to renovate the building.
Brighton and Hove City Council emptied the office block last year after a report detailed serious fire safety failings and is now set to sell it off.
Just over a decade before, a £24.5 million revamp of the block was the centrepiece of an initiative known as the Greater Brighton City Deal, for which the council was given the grant and earmarked almost £9 million from its own budget, with the rest set to come from private investment.
This week, the council’s cabinet is being asked to rubberstamp plans to sell it, with the report saying that renovating it would be too expensive, with an estimated cost now put at £67 million.
A 2024 report estimated the value of the block as £0 because of the remedial work needed, but the council says it now expects it to sell for more than that.
Meanwhile, a group called the Friends of New England House is waiting to hear whether its bid to get the block listed as an asset of community value (ACV) is successful – which the council was meant to consider by yesterday.
If an ACV is put on the market, the seller must give the nominator six months in which to raise money to put in its own bid to buy it.
One of the group, Alex Morrison, who was chair of Wired Sussex, a former tenant of the building, said: “My colleagues at Wired Sussex worked tirelessly to get that City Deal money in order to benefit the local tech sector and creative industries.
“The council made substantial commitments in return for that money and delivered virtually nothing.
“Now they propose to dispose of New England House while pretending that none of this ever happened. It’s shocking – and so short-sighted because the need for a beacon/hub for our tech sector and creative industries is still urgent.”
In 2014, a report on the City Deal called New England House the “centrepiece of Brighton’s creative-tech cluster”.
It said: “This investment will provide the flexible space, infrastructure and connectivity that Brighton’s most exciting businesses need to grow, while nurturing a new wave of entrepreneurs and business models.
“It will also put Brighton on the map as one of the UK’s most important tech clusters, one which operates on an international stage.”
At that point, 96 businesses were based there, employing 1,000 people and it had a waiting list of 67 companies. The revamp would have increased the floorspace by 7,090 sqm to 18,460 sqm.
When asked what happened to the project, and the grant, a council spokesman said: “The funding received as part of the Greater Brighton City Deal was not enough to deliver a refurbishment and extension project, without a fully funded project, it could not progress.
“The council’s capital programme budgeted £11m for the refurbishment of New England house. Following the decision to close New England Hosue and pending decisions on its future, the budget has been reduced in line with the activities required to manage the closure and prepare for next steps.
Where did the money go? Receipts and invoices need to be disclosed in the public domain. If the money was returned to central govt or improperly spent on another project, that needs to be disclosed.
Who was the council’s Chief Financial Officer at the time?
So basically the Council got all this money to refurbish the place and then spent on something else ( what? )
And how is this not fraud ?
“The £4.9 million government funding…has been entirely used on eligible schemes.”
Just think, if this had been sold off would the finances have been made public, or the losses ?? or maybe that’s why selling it was favoured ???
They now seem in a hurry to offload it. I wonder why.
Building gone money gone, or would have been, no doubt it will soon make an appearance in accounting somewhere, eventually with a variant on plus and minus.