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Around £5m would have had to be cut from the costs of Preston’s Levelling Up Fund projects had one of them – a controversial revamp of Ashton Park – not been scrapped in its entirety, the Local Democracy Reporting Service (LDRS) understands.
The salami-slice savings could have affected the majority of the seven schemes for which Preston City Council received £20m in January last year from a cash pot created by the previous government.
Members of the authority’s ruling Labour group voted to abandon the vision for Ashton Park – of creating a synthetic 3G football pitch, six grass pictures and a sports pavilion – at a meeting on Tuesday.
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A confidential document presented to the gathering – seen by the LDRS – revealed that the Ashton scheme alone was threatening to exceed its £9.7m originally-estimated cost by £1.1m.
A source has now told the LDRS that, collectively, the programme was approximately £5m short of the amount needed to deliver the projects as they were envisaged when the city council made its bid to the Levelling Up Fund two years ago.
Subject to government approval and a vote of the full council, the decision to drop the Ashton Park plan means the money saved can now be diverted into the city’s other Levelling Up Fund schemes – namely, upgrades to Moor Park, Waverley Park and Grange Park, a new cycle route on Queen Street and Avenham Lane, improvements to Friargate South in the city centre and the replacement of the crumbling Old Tram Bridge. However, it is thought that the latter would have been protected from any cost-cutting requirement, as work on it is already under way.
The LDRS understands that an eighth project that featured in Preston’s bid – the creation of cycle storage in the form of a”mobility hub” at Preston bus station – had already been dropped after failing to attract the necessary support of Lancashire County Council in its capacity as the transport authority.
The Labour-run city council says the nature of Levelling Up funding – and the fact the development of Preston’s projects coincided with a huge spike in inflation – meant that the budget pressures and resultant changes were unavoidable.
However, opposition politicians have questioned how much money has been spent on drawing up the now abandoned plans for Ashton Park.
Liberal Democrat group leader John Potter branded the handling of the contentious scheme – which was opposed in a 2-200 signature petition – “a mess”.
“It has gone from bad to farce and back again. Although, to give Labour credit, they have now united all sides of this debate – everyone is annoyed at them.
“The whole Ashton Park project has been dogged by infighting, chaos and confusion by Labour. How much time, effort and money has been wasted?
“No one wins from this. We now will get zero investment in better drainage and grass pitches on Ashton Park,” said Cllr Potter.
He also questioned whether the city would now “lose out” on housing developer cash – totalling £600,000 – which had been earmarked as a contribution to the original Ashton Park scheme, but is now subject to legal advice in order to determine its eligibility for use on any alternative proposal for the plot.
Conservative group leader Stephen Thompson expressed similar sentiment about feared waste – and warned of the need to guard “taxpayers’ cash”.
“A lot has been spent getting [the Ashton Park scheme] off the ground, only for it to be pulled – so there is no benefit to the people of Preston.”
Referencing the use of the money saved on Ashton Park to bail out the other, over-budget Levelling Up Fund schemes, Cllr Thompson added: “If I was going to build anything, I’d always add a chunk of money on top of the estimate knowing that I don’t think any project comes in at the price quoted.”
However, the city council’s Labour cabinet member for resources, Martyn Rawlinson, said the problems stemmed from Levelling Up schemes having a “fixed” budget and specification “at a time when project costs across all areas were rising”.
“We have been advised by civil servants that no additional funding can be made available and further changes can only be considered with further detailed submissions. With build cost inflation at unprecedented levels in recent years, the practicalities of balancing project budgets has led to some significant challenges and difficult decisions being made.
“The competitive nature of the process, and the timescales allowed, have limited a greater degree of flexibility and changes were ultimately inevitable. Needless to say, we always deliver the best schemes we can for the people of Preston when we are offered funding to do so,” Cllr Rawlinson said.
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