An exhibition of outline plans to refurbish and extend Wonford Community & Learning Centre and Wonford Sports Centre, combining them into a single Wonford Community Wellbeing Hub, has confirmed that finance for the expected £7 million construction costs has yet to be found.
The project, which was first mooted nearly nine years ago and will only be completed by autumn 2026 if funding is agreed this summer, will have cost well in excess of £1 million to put together. Contracts worth more than £550,000 have been awarded to Exeter City Living, the council’s failed subsidiary company, as part of project development.
Exeter City Council currently hopes that Sport England will fund most of the refurbishment and extension costs, attracting other investors to meet the shortfall, but says it will need to secure planning consent first, with an application for full planning permission expected in May.
The council had to restart project development in spring 2022, scrapping plans to demolish and rebuild the complex it had proposed three years earlier as part of its Exeter Live Better & Move More Draft Built Facilities, Playing Fields, Pitches, Play Areas, Parks And Green Spaces strategy.
It nevertheless presented a “feasibility proposal” asking councillors to spend £750,000 on project development as a progression of its existing plans, and has stuck to the same continuity narrative since despite making major changes to cut costs.
Wonford Community Wellbeing Hub continuity narrative graphic. Image: Space & Place.
The idea of improving the Wonford facilities to create “Wonford Inclusive Sport Hub” (WISH) was first raised in a May 2015 consultancy report commissioned by the city council which explored “proposals for changes and improvements to the existing buildings”.
The following year, ownership of Wonford Community & Learning Centre was transferred from the county council to the city council as part of the closure of several Exeter youth centres.
Then in 2018 the city council created a £3 million budget to fund an “interim plan for consolidating and investing in existing built sports and leisure facilities” while also confirming the permanent closure of Clifton Hill sports centre.
At the same time plans to “reposition Wonford Sports Centre as a community hub where sport and physical activity can be used to develop community health and wellbeing opportunities” were being developed by Parkwood Leisure, then the centre operator, to “contribute to the priorities set out in the Sport England Local Delivery Pilot programme”.
The programme, which had begun earlier that year, aims to address health inequalities that obstruct access to sport and physical activity. Initially funded with £100 million of National Lottery money over four years, it was focussed in twelve pilot areas across the country, with the £4.7 million Exeter and Cranbrook pilot delivered under the Live & Move banner.
Wonford Community Wellbeing Hub option one plan. Image: Space & Place.
In February 2019, the city council announced “an innovative, new-build integrated community health and wellbeing centre to replace the existing Wonford sports and community centres” as part of its draft Built Facilities, Playing Fields, Pitches, Play Areas, Parks And Green Spaces strategy.
It said the “flagship” development would be “designed with the local community, building on the aspirational proposals put forward in 2016” [sic], citing a 2018 indoor sports facilities review by another council consultant. A site masterplan and business case were to be prepared during a public consultation on the draft strategy that followed.
Consultation feedback was published in June, accompanied by four more consultancy reports and a revised, final version of the strategy.
The council said the Wonford site master plan and business case, neither of which had been produced as planned, would now be prepared. A “blueprint and site master plan” would be ready by December 2019, but no deadline was given for the new hub’s business case.
Extensive stakeholder feedback on the plans was also published, including a prescient comment from Exeter Civic Society: “The sports facilities and community hall at Wonford were purpose built in the mid-1980s so are only about 30 years old, and have many years life left in them.
“It should be perfectly feasible to adapt and refurbish these facilities to achieve the integrated community and wellbeing centre that is suggested. This will be achieved at much less cost than building new.”
Wonford Community Wellbeing Hub option two plan. Image: Space & Place.
Another three consultancy reports were commissioned for a follow-up meeting focussed on the Wonford facilities six months later, in December 2019.
One found that “there was clearly a perception from some local stakeholders that ‘nothing had happened’ as a result of the WISH consultation”, adding “a key reason for this was the lack of clear feedback to the community about what would happen next”.
It nevertheless concluded that the earlier consultation had “laid some of the groundwork and was a starting point for the current engagement process with the local community on the potential for a new health and wellbeing centre”.
The accompanying council report proposed the preparation of an outline business case for the new Wonford hub, including “indicative sketches, layouts, designs and building and running costs” but did not mention the twice-promised, now due, “blueprint and site master plan” or that it had decided to produce a business case for the hub twice before.
It said it would complete a design brief by July 2020 and “develop the outline business case into a more detailed proposal”, a process which would be co-ordinated by Exeter City Living. A full business case would then be brought back for approval by councillors “by December 2020”.
Wonford Community Wellbeing Hub option three plan. Image: Space & Place.
By March 2020 Exeter City Living was acknowledging in private that the developing pandemic meant its July reporting deadline might “slip”. It nevertheless said it was getting on with the preparation of a “full business case for the new centre to demonstrate its financial viability and sustainability long-term”.
An online survey followed in July, then another in October on various design options for new replacement buildings.
Four were presented, with varying layouts. All included a cafe, youth club and gym with outdoor facilities for skateboarding, climbing, football and other games plus bike parking and a plaza. All also provided accommodation for Wonford Green Surgery, intending its relocation from the corner of Burnthouse Lane so its current site could be sold for redevelopment.
Option one additionally included a two-court sports hall with a permanent stage, option two the same sports hall with a separate spinning studio, option three replaced them both with a four-court sports hall and option four kept the four-court sports hall and added a spinning studio.
A fifth design option was also then added, in response to survey feedback, which adapted option four to provide a full-sized sports hall. No drawing of this option appears to be available.
A subsequent survey results summary said some residents had expressed concern that “this approach would result in the community being pushed out by citywide sports use”, but added that “providing some sports use is part of the financial model that will contribute to viability”.
Overall, it said, the community supported option five.
In January 2021, a month after the full business case for the new hub was supposed to be ready, the council said business modelling was under way but would not be complete for “about a year”.
Wonford Community Wellbeing Hub option four plan. Image: Space & Place.
Thirteen months later, in February 2022, the council published a press release headed: “Plans progress to create a new Health and Wellbeing Hub in Wonford”.
It was a trail for a “feasibility proposal” due before the council Executive committee the following week. The proposal, presented in a remarkably slight report, was to spend £750,000 “to progress to the next workstage” of the Wonford hub project.
This was to include “further detailed feasibility” work “towards full planning consent for the redevelopment of the existing Wonford community and sports centre facilities”. The council described the three years it had spent on the project since February 2019 as its “initial” stage, skating through the six workstreams the new funding was to pay for in less than 400 words.
It also said the money would be used partly for “project management capacity through Exeter City Living, commissioning architectural and other technical input to lead to planning submission” but did not say that the resulting contract would be worth £460,000 + VAT to the company.
It said that all the work, including the submission of a full planning application, “is expected to take 12 to 14 months to complete”, which would have meant the end of March 2023.
The only mention of a business case was the finance director’s warning that if the council wanted “to proceed further, there will need to be a detailed business case identifying sources of capital funding to deliver the project, including any borrowing requirement” with any such business case “expected to assess the costs of borrowing against the revenue benefit that the project delivers”.
He added: “If there is a gap in resources, it is expected that the business case will identify ways of addressing this shortfall”.
The report didn’t say how much had already been spent on project development. And it didn’t say that all the work that had taken place so far had been based on the assumption that the existing buildings would be demolished in favour of a “flagship new-build”, but that now the council was instead assuming refurbishment and extension of the existing buildings was all it could afford.
Nor did it include the outline refurbishment and extension plans which had been produced by project architects Space & Place four months earlier and labelled “option six”.
Wonford Community Wellbeing Hub option six plans. Image: Space & Place.
The council was nevertheless privately admitting to stakeholders that it had gone back to the drawing board to cut costs because the “new build would run the risk of not being financially possible” and was instead pursuing what it called an “extension and improvement” approach.
It also admitted that this option had not been “developed during the feasibility stage” and so would require “further surveys and exploratory work”, meaning it would now take take another “circa three and a half years” to complete the project.
A Spring 2022 Wonford Community & Learning Centre newsletter was more direct. It said the council had “scrapped plans to demolish the community centre and sports centre and replace them with a new building incorporating the GP surgery”, adding that it was “now looking into the possibility of refurbishing the two centres and replacing the old changing rooms between them with a café”.
By October the council was acknowledging in public that it needed to “secure external investment to deliver the Wonford Community Wellbeing hub”, even with its scaled-back plans.
Then this time last year, following another consultancy report, it emerged that “an initial draft business plan for the hub facility” was finally being prepared. The council confirmed this in August, saying a “formal business case is being developed to identify the capital and revenue costing models for the building” with the project getting “closer to planning in late 2023”.
Wonford Community Wellbeing Hub option seven plan. Image: Space & Place.
A recent council press release promoting the “latest designs” for the hub nevertheless says that “there is still a long way to go” and that it still needs “to secure the necessary funding”. We might call these outline designs option seven, as they differ again from the option six drawings.
There’s apparently still money in the project development pot, if a three-minute animated “flythrough” produced to promote last week’s public exhibition of the plans is anything to go by. But the question remains whether Sport England will fund most, if not all, of the capital cost of the refurbishment and extension, and then whether other investors can be found to cover the rest.
Sport England’s Local Delivery Pilot programme was significantly extended last year, with £35 million of a total of £250 million additional lottery and treasury funding reserved for distribution between the twelve pilot areas, now to be renamed “Place Partnerships”.
The council has not yet asked for the cash, but its executive committee intends to discuss an application for Place Partner status, and three years’ accompanying funding, at the beginning of next month.
