'No option' but to continue Bristol Beacon work amid spiralling costs - Bristol Mayor
Marvin Rees says he would still have gone ahead with Bristol Beacon’s renovation even if he had known the £107million costs beforehand.
The amount needed to fix and reopen the iconic building has more than doubled, with an extra £44.5million expected to land on city council taxpayers.
Bristol Mayor Marvin Rees has likened the project as being like a standard MOT - with the full extent of repairs only discovered when the bonnet of the car was lifted.
He said it has now become a heritage project and it would still have been worth it if the full extent of the works needed were identified in advance.
Speaking at a fortnightly press conference on Wednesday 3 March, Mr Rees blamed previous administrations for “kicking the issue down the road”.
He said an extension which opened a decade ago should not have been built without carrying out exploratory work on the main building.
Asked whether he would have taken the same decision to approve the revamp, the mayor said: “I would. I don’t think there is an option.
“It wouldn’t have been good for Bristol to have a major concert venue in the middle of the city and just leave it to fall into disrepair.
“Once you go down the route of renovating Bristol Beacon then we are on the journey."
He highlighted there has been no major work on Bristol Beacon in 60 years, adding: “These kinds of investigations into the state of the building should have been undertaken a long time ago.
“Ten years ago a big gold extension was built on the edge of Colston Hall and no work was done on the main building.
“We should have looked at the whole project right there and then.
“Decisions about major capital projects which are needed to keep the material of the city together to cope with the growing population have been kicked down the road for decades but we are fronting them up now which is why we are talking about such large numbers.
“We are facing up to those decisions. Some of them are painful, and they’re more painful now than if we had faced up to them some time ago.”
Mr Rees said halting the project would actually be more expensive because it would involve reimbursing all the organisations which had invested.
He said: “Because the building is listed you can’t turn it into flats, so the only option would be to wrap it up and leave it to continue to deteriorate which would in itself have costs because you would have to safeguard the site, seal it up and pay for security.
“It would cost the city more to mothball it than to proceed, but then we would also lose out on the contribution to the cultural sector and the gross value added which we estimate over 10 years to be £250million.
“This is an essential piece of work and unfortunately it’s phenomenally complex, but the complexity of that has only been added to by the fact that the city has not faced up to it for 60 years.
“When you have a 150-year-old building where nothing has been done on it for 60 years, that talks about a city of inaction for such a long time.”
Colston toppling: Four people plead 'not guilty' to criminal damage charges
Wild meadow to be created in Bristol one year on from Greta Thunberg rally
Mr Rees said it was “not a case of spiralling costs” because what had been discovered meant the project was “fundamentally different” from the original.
“This was always a £100million project, it’s just that we didn’t know that until all those complexities were properly understood,” he added.
A report to Bristol City Council cabinet next week reveals the refurbishment will now cost £106.9million.
Its original budget of £48.8million in 2018 rose to £52.2million a year later, but a huge catalogue of unforeseen structural problems, such as Elizabethan wells and hollow pillars propping up roofs, have since been discovered.
Cabinet members are expected to approve the spending of an extra £58.1million on Tuesday, with £44.5million coming from the local authority’s capital budget.
The remaining extra £13.6million is expected to be covered by £6.2million from the Arts Council, £6.3million from the West of England Combined Authority and £1.1million to be raised by the Bristol Music Trust.
Credit: Adam Postans, Local Democracy Reporter.
Read more: