Seven years ago last week Exeter City Council’s executive committee decided to close Clifton Hill sports centre permanently on what it claimed were best value grounds. Heavy snowfall had damaged its roof, apparently beyond repair.
The council would sell the whole Clifton Hill site for development. Proceeds from the sale would be used to offset unspecified compensation costs payable to the council leisure services operator and “provide investment for other council priorities including the development and improvement of other leisure sites”.
These sites would benefit from “a total budget of £3,000,000 to fund an interim plan for consolidating and investing in existing built sports and leisure facilities to improve and update the current offer to citizens”, according to a report by council director Jo Yelland.
A “new and improved community swimming pool” would be built at Exeter Arena to “replace the ageing Northbrook Pool”, according to the plan Jo Yelland later brought back, and Clifton Hill sports centre users would be redirected to a then-unbuilt complex called St Sidwell’s Point instead.
Concerns raised by councillors about the impact of the Clifton Hill closure on local residents, the challenges they faced in travelling to other leisure centres, the lack of public consultation on the decision and the lack of hard figures in the director’s report fell on deaf ears.
Clifton Hill sports centre had been “difficult to maintain to acceptable standards”, had suffered from low membership numbers and income levels and faced a “backlog of maintenance and repairs estimated in [the] region of £500k” plus a roof replacement at an estimated cost of £1 million.
No documents were provided to back up these estimates, and a petition of 1,500 signatures opposing the closure failed to sway the executive committee’s resolve.
The full council signed off on the decision the following day despite the best attempts of opposition councillors, who queried the haste in which the decision was being made.
It also approved a budget of £150,000 to demolish the buildings – there would be no going back – and confirmed that it planned to sell the green space, driving range, ski slope and rifle range behind the sports centre for development too.
Clifton Hill sports centre redevelopment site
A few months later Phil Bialyk, then the lead councillor for health and well-being, communities and sport, apologised that no consultation had been held on the fate of the site. The council also admitted that no structural survey had been carried out before the decision to demolish the buildings had been taken.
Another petition, this time to save the ski slope and with 2,600 signatures, was presented to the council in February 2019. Its response was that it would only get a capital receipt of around £8.8 million if it sold the whole site for open market residential accommodation, and that disposing of the Clifton Hill sports centre site alone “would not achieve best value for the council”.
It also approved a budget of £200,000 for ground investigation works and to market and sell the site.
Local opposition grew. Jemima Moore of the Save Clifton Hill Green Space campaign stood for election as an Independent councillor at the city council elections in May. She won by a landslide.
A few weeks later the council’s new leader Phil Bialyk said the decision to sell whole site would be reconsidered and by the end of the year the council agreed, although it said it would have to address the consequences of only selling the much smaller sports centre site.
An independent market valuation of the rump site said it would fetch £4.35 million if sold for redevelopment as student accommodation. But the council executive committee instead decided to sell it for £2.14 million to Exeter City Living, the council’s property development company, immediately after loaning the company £15.6 million to enable it to buy and develop the site.
The council had to ask the Secretary of State for permission to sell it for less than best value because precluding student accommodation meant it would fetch £2.11 million less than it was worth.
Clifton Hill sports centre redevelopment illustrative layout, December 2022
The company duly submitted a planning application in June 2020 to build 31 luxury town houses for private market sale and eleven “affordable” flats. The council approved it in December.
Then the following year the company revised its application to remove all the affordable housing from the plans – based on a viability assessment valuing the land for student accommodation – and the council again agreed.
Despite this concession the company twice failed to find a contractor willing to take on the project even after demolishing the buildings to help prepare the site and the government awarding a £425,000 Brownfield Land Release Fund grant to enable the development.
Then, in October 2023, the council finally saw the writing on the wall and decided to all-but wind up Exeter City Living after it made £4.5 million losses.
To help claw back some of the £10 million the company owed, council officers proposed selling the Clifton Hill sports centre site for student accommodation after all. It was then worth just under £4 million on this basis, while the best the council could expect to get for any other use was then just over £3 million.
The council’s executive committee members rejected the proposal, saying the site should be sold for residential development even if the council wouldn’t get best value as a result. At the same time they agreed another budget – for £800,000 – to cover the costs of preparing both the Clifton Hill site and Mary Arches car parks – another abandoned Exeter City Living project – for sale.
Clifton Hill sports centre sale brochure, August 2024
In March last year the council accordingly bought back the Clifton Hill sports centre site from Exeter City Living. It paid £3.037 million – £897,000 more than the sale price.
The site went up for sale in August, complete with the remaining £225,000 Brownfield Land Release Fund grant as a sweetener for the developer to draw down later.
No bids were submitted to take forward the existing planning consent. The highest bid, for £3.375 million, was from a developer proposing 72 flats in the form of a build-to-rent extra-care scheme.
The council says the rent for these mostly one-bedroom flats will be “no more than 80% of the open market rent and service charge for a similar open market product” but also says that they will only be made available “to older Exeter residents on the housing register for the first 25 years of the scheme”.
It accepted this bid last month. According to another independent valuation the site was then worth £3.8 million so the council again sold it at an undervalue, this time £425,000, with the remaining £225,000 Brownfield Land Release Fund money on top.
Last week it then approved a budget of £50,000 for “disposal costs (including external agency and legal fees) associated with this sale”.
It first said the sale “will generate capital receipts for the council that could be used to reduce the council’s capital financing requirement” but then added: “The funds from the capital receipt will have to be used to write down the [Exeter City Living] debt associated with the asset”.
Clifton Hill sports centre redevelopment site
So, in sum, the council sold the Clifton Hill sports centre site to Exeter City Living in 2020 for £2.14 million, which was £2.11 million less than it was then worth.
It then bought the site back from the company last year for £3.037 million, which was £897,000 more than the company paid for it. It then agreed last month to sell it again for £3.37 million, this time for £425,000 less than it was worth and with a £225,000 sweetener on top for the developer.
It also agreed a £150,000 demolition budget in June 2018, a £200,000 ground investigation works and marketing/sale budget in February 2019, approximately half of an £800,000 budget to prepare it and the Mary Arches car parks site for sale in November 2023 and a £50,000 disposal costs budget last week. £200,000 of the brownfield grant can be offset against this.
Put this all together and the city has ended up with around £3 million less than the site’s £4.35 million market value five years ago, when it could simply have sold it for the best value it could get.
No doubt the council’s leadership had no idea its decision to close Clifton Hill sports centre would still be haunting it seven years later. The next time it says it is closing a leisure centre in the city’s best interests we should probably think it has no idea what is doing then, either.
