There’s little doubt that change – or an upgrade – is overdue at the King Alfred. Ideas for a replacement leisure centre have ebbed and flowed since the plumes were removed at the turn of the millennium.
And the urgency shown by this Labour administration in developing alternative provision is justified in this sense. But urgency alone isn’t enough.
Once in a lifetime, statement municipal infrastructure projects need bravery. The current King Alfred Leisure Centre proposal has bravery: but in all the wrong places. And that bravery does not include design or location.
The King Alfred will go before the Planning Committee on Wednesday (29 July). I’ve gone through all the public comments which was a mammoth task.
The public and community interest in the scheme is massive: of the 651 public comments I looked at, 48 are in favour of the scheme, 25 are neutral and 578 are objections.
Compare this with the public response to a planning application for a major historic seafront development to the east – the i360 – which had 74 objections. Nine times as many planning objections as the i360. Not a good sign.
In the planning objections to the new King Alfred, there is some evidence of campaign-driven “cut and paste” responses but most objections are individual and unique.
They raise concerns about heritage, design, the uncertainty of future housing delivery on 60 per cent of the site and not enough to do for kids from 8 to 15.
Most of all, objections are concerned about the smaller leisure centre footprint and an offer that in many ways doesn’t match what’s there now. Is this inevitable? Is this just the nature of compromise and balancing competing demands?
That gets you thinking about how these decisions are made and what the drivers are. Three pressures come to mind
- The obvious need for a new or refurbished leisure centre for Hove
- Brighton and Hove City Council’s need to develop housing to meet targets and address our housing crisis
- The need for capital receipts to meet the cost of the project and also to meet the increasing cost of council debt
How are these drivers ranked in importance? Capital receipts are probably at the top of the list at the moment. The need to meet housing targets is probably in second place. Leaving the sports and leisure centre a poor third.
Maybe this goes some way to explaining the nature of the proposal we have in front of us. It also explains why the “refurb” option is not viable for the council.
The refurb option is probably the environmentally preferred option and also the preferred option of local campaigners and many of those who sent in comments on the planning application.
The problem is that the refurb option does not release land for sale and it limits the potential for new housing on the site.
Given these council drivers, the hard-nosed option to take would have been to put the whole site up for disposal – for housing – and build a new sports and leisure centre elsewhere in Hove.
The council sold its old headquarters – the King’s House site – for £27 million 10 years ago. The value of the whole prime seafront site occupied by the current King Alfred would be far higher.
This takes us to dry and dusty topics of economics and risk. There was of course an option to build a new leisure centre elsewhere, namely the so-called LSS – “Land South of Sainsbury’s”.
This would have had to be built on the existing sports ground south of the large West Hove Sainsbury’s at the Old Shoreham Road end of Benfield Valley, west of Hangleton Road.
Council finance officers spent a lot of time developing the respective economic cases for the various options using the Treasury “Green Book” approach.
They concluded that the land south of Sainsbury’s offered by far the best outcomes in terms of likely returns and benefit-cost ratio.
The conclusions of the Treasury-mandated approach to the King Alfred options were ignored by Labour – ironically, while the “Green Book” approach was being used elsewhere in council life as a stick to beat political opponents.
It’s arguable that the hard-nosed option with the best economics was also the option that provided the greatest opportunity – the greatest opportunity to design and deliver the landmark sports and leisure centre that a lot of the public planning comments wanted. An opportunity for bravery in site selection and design.
The option of putting the new King Alfred on the land south of Sainsbury’s also probably carried the least risk for the council.
Risk is possibly the element of the current proposal that I’m most worried about. We’ve already seen project costs go up from £47 million to £65 million.
Recent papers approved additional spend so that total figure has undoubtedly increased further.
There’s a basic rule about using public money for infrastructure projects: the rule of cost-benefit parity. If the ratio of costs to benefits drops below 1, the project should not be publicly funded.
I think the current King Alfred project may well go below 1 and Labour will then need to find extraordinary justification for this proposal.
There are many risks with the current site. Its low-lying coastal location, difficult ground conditions, the split use of the site, the uncertainty about the value of the 60 per cent of the site to be eventually sold – after the new King Alfred Leisure Centre has been completed.
All this has potential to cost this council many millions more.
Public consultation was in favour of retaining the coastal site. Planning comments some time later are overwhelmingly against what’s been proposed. In terms of economics and risk, the coastal site performs poorly.
Some might say municipal bravery in these circumstances is to continue in the face of headwinds and prove everyone wrong. Others might say we’ve been there before.
Ollie Sykes is a Green Party councillor and represents Brunswick and Adelaide ward on Brighton and Hove City Council.
At last an honest appraisal of the situation. It may be unpopular but I think it will turn out to have been 100% accurate.
I hope the centre is a success, and I suspect the planning for its replacement on the same site is too far along to be re-thought, but it’s disturbing that in a bid to appease the public the council seems to be barreling ahead with a plan that will provide a sub-par leisure centre and cost the public millions more than necessary. And staff reports have warned of this from the beginning.
The public did initially prefer the centre to remain where it is but I don’t think they would do so still if it had been clearly spelled out to them that building on a different site instead would allow for a significantly better centre and at a lower cost. And I suspect nearly all the people who could have had that centre on their doorstep if it had been moved were not aware that this was an option they could push for.
I think, unfortunately, you touch upon a powerful point that public opinion is often poorly informed. It lends itself to the argument that public consultation needs to be a lot more specific in what it asks, and doesn’t ask.
If the average person isn’t likely to understand the financial implications of the choice of location, should they have been given that choice in the first place? Should a more broader question been asked?
I think the councillor would do well to recall that the LSS site was rejected because of restrictive legal covenants, and wasn’t as simple as just an economic consideration.