Exeter Civic Centre has provided Exeter City Council with its headquarters for half a century, since its 1972 completion on the site of a former Paris Street car park.
For the past seven years the council has been hoping to move across the road into new, purpose-built offices as part of the redevelopment of the site bounded by Paris Street, Sidwell Street and Cheeke Street, which includes St Sidwell’s Point leisure centre and the new bus station.
Citypoint, a £300 million “development concept” for the site, as it was described by then-council chief executive Karime Hassan, was the result of the failure of previous private sector-led redevelopment proposals which were supposed to be delivered in parallel with the publicly-funded construction of the bus station and leisure centre.
The replacement Citypoint scheme included a mix of build-to-rent and open market housing, offices and flexible workspaces, retail and food outlets and two hotels. It also provided a new civic centre to which the council would relocate.
2018 Citypoint redevelopment scheme drawing. Source: Exeter City Council.
What might be described as the “ambition” of the Citypoint concept did not prevent the council agreeing to spend £400,000 exploring it at the same time as it topped up the spiralling St Sidwell’s Point leisure centre construction budget by £12 million in 2018.
As recently as October 2021, despite the pandemic, the council was still hoping to see the scheme through by building a new “civic hub” itself, on the site of the old bus station.
However working practice changes prompted by the pandemic and significant staff reductions resulting from the removal of unfilled posts were leaving the council’s current offices largely empty.
Its attempts to find tenants to let unused space foundered. Despite Devon & Cornwall Police and Exeter Citizens Advice Bureau moving in alongside Strata, the council’s IT company, it fell short on its target rental budgets in the three years to March 2023 by £646,000.
Meanwhile budget deficits, driven not least by St Sidwell’s Point leisure centre losses, and looming spending cuts compelled the council, now led by chief executive Bindu Arjoon, to pull in its horns. It has now, finally, declared Citypoint dead.
It instead plans to downsize to several much smaller offices by converting space in buildings it already owns – in the Guildhall shopping centre, Phoenix arts venue and Oakwood House – and by making ad hoc use of space at other council property including Matford livestock centre.
Exeter City Council offices relocation feasibility study. Source: Exeter City Council.
A feasibility study outlining its plans – the cost of which has not been disclosed – was presented to the council’s executive committee on Tuesday. It was accompanied by requests for £100,000 for “full designs and costings” and “approval to move to the next stage of planning a potential move”.
The study proposes the creation of a council public service point in a ground floor Guildhall shopping centre retail unit, currently occupied by House of Tweed, with first floor offices above in space occupied by InExeter, the city’s Business Improvement District company.
It also proposes the conversion of a section of the shopping centre’s first floor above WHSmith which was previously occupied by Ferns cafeteria and a hairdressers, as well as the floor above, beside the top car park deck, which was once used by Exeter College.
A complete refit of all these spaces would be required.
The proposals also include the conversion of Oakwood House in Exton Road, currently used by council waste collection services, and offices occupied by RAMM staff on the top floor of the Exeter Phoenix building in Bradninch Place.
They scotch a community asset transfer that would have brought the charity-run Phoenix arts venue, which is celebrating its 25th anniversary, into community ownership.
They are also expected to preclude the council continuing to provide Citizens Advice Exeter or Devon & Cornwall Police with city centre accommodation.
Guildhall shopping centre sale brochure. Source: Knight Frank.
The council is keen to present its relocation plans as cost-neutral. Both the £100,000 design and costings budget and the resulting capital costs entailed by the move are expected to come from the profit the council makes from the Guildhall shopping centre.
It claims this means that the move will come at “no cost to council taxpayers” on the grounds that any Guildhall shopping centre surplus is ring-fenced.
One executive committee member, who also attended both October 2021 council meetings that approved the £55 million Guildhall shopping centre leasehold acquisition and redevelopment budget, asked the council finance director what this meant.
The response did not make clear that there are many ways the council might spend the shopping centre surplus.
The agreement the council reached with the government to enable it to borrow £44 million from the Public Works Loan Board in December 2021 to buy back the shopping centre leasehold – it owned the freehold already – only prohibits the use of the surplus for ordinary service spending and requires its use for “regeneration projects” instead.
These can, according to the government, have one or more of several, wide-ranging characteristics.
They can address “economic or social market failure by providing services, facilities, or other amenities that are of value to local people and would not otherwise be provided by the private sector”, or can involve “significant additional activity that would not otherwise happen without the local authority’s intervention, creating jobs and/or social or economic value”.
So not only is the way the council spends any Guildhall shopping centre surplus not restricted in the way it suggests, how it does so is of material interest to Exeter council taxpayers.
Mary Arches car parks sale brochure. Source: Avison Young.
The council is also keen to promote the idea that its relocation would enable the sale of the Civic Centre for redevelopment.
No budget has been requested for this purpose, and council officers say it will be addressed by the same “internal resources” that have been dealing with Mary Arches car parks and Clifton Hill sports centre. (An £800,000 budget was approved in December 2021 to enable these sales.)
Neither site has so far sold. An offer has been made recently for Mary Arches car parks, which has been on the market since April, and an October bid deadline has been set for Clifton Hill sports centre, apparently prompted by the prospect of planning consent for the site expiring next June.
Other large city centre sites are also stalled, although the first of eight Harlequins shopping centre redevelopment pre-commencement conditions has now been discharged, with others pending.
Clifton Hill sports centre sale brochure. Source: JLL.
Perhaps more pertinently, the Paris Street site that faces the Civic Centre, into which the council has already ploughed £54 million to try to tempt private sector investment in the rest, has not moved forward since outline permission for its redevelopment was granted in 2015.
None of the council’s development partners will front the risk entailed in taking any further steps, and the council cannot afford to do so itself.
With Mike Ashley reportedly in talks to buy out the Crown Estate’s interest in Princesshay, and Crown Estate resources now oriented towards offshore wind, the prospect of the site across the road from the Civic Centre coming forward anytime soon looks remote.
It took the council more than five years to demolish the old bus station following its closure, and a temporary car park is now planned.
The £100,000 budget for the next stage in the council’s relocation plans will be signed off at a meeting next month, eighteen months after the feasibility study began.
Several more steps have yet to come including contracts tendering, a tendering report and council approval of the budget required to make the move happen, as well as works in all the new spaces and the move itself.
If the council can then sell the Civic Centre, and if redevelopment then takes place, we might eventually see the site more fruitfully used than it will have been between now and then.
