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Community Centre

Llanidloes Community Centre was built in the 1960s with money raised by the local community on land donated for that purpose by Sir George Hamer in 1948. For many years the Centre had been managed and funded by the Town Council (assisted by a voluntary committee), making the building a burden on local rates payers. In September 2006 the Council took the decision to close the Centre amidst concerns about Health & Safety and the spiralling costs of the rates and heating bills on the building.

Over the years, various options have been looked at for renovating or renewing the Community Centre. The most recent was the Idloes Project, a group set up in 2002 by the Town Council but including a membership drawn from the old management committee, L.L.A.N.I. Ltd, the Drama Group, Rotary and others. I was initially one of the representatives from the board of L.L.A.N.I. Ltd, and in time L.L.A.N.I. Ltd came to provide the secretariat to the group and was responsible for drawing down the funding that paid for the various feasibility studies that were undertaken over the course of the next four years. Looking first at the potential to build new facilities, then to renovate and expand on the existing facilities, the Idloes Project struggled to come up with a workable option for the centre.

In the meanwhile, the Town Council, took the decision to go with a suggestion from consultants KPMG that the only way to develop a sustainable option for community facilities in the town was to sell one of the council’s existing assets, and use the proceeds to provide new facilities at another. The Town Council thus decided that the thing to do was to sell off the Community Centre and reinvest the proceeds of the sale in building new facilities on land available to the rear of the Town Hall. This proposal had the benefit of re-developing a run down area of the Town Hall and securing the future of a more prestigious Grade II listed building, which like the Community Centre, also operates at a loss and is in need of refurbishment.

At the same time as they made this decision, the Town Council closed the Community Centre and the Idloes Project, with nothing more to do, called it a day.

L.L.A.N.I. Ltd next secured funding to undertake a feasibility study into the cost of developing the new facilities at the Town Hall, and a first stage application was successfully made to the National Lottery for the necessary funding to progress the project. This brought together representatives of the Town Council, L.L.A.N.I. Ltd, LLES Ltd and the Community Transport Scheme into a partnership working agreement under the name of the Community Buildings Steering Group, charged with the remit of developing a workable project that would deliver sustainable facilities for the town.

But the development process of a full lottery application quickly made it clear that the project at the Town Hall was both too expensive and physically difficult. It also had no local support. It therefore became necessary to look again at the Community Centre with fresh eyes, and the process of doing so was helped by the discovery that the original gift of land by Sir George Hamer had been charitable and had, de facto, set up a charitable trust. No charitable body having ever been set up and registered with the Charity Commission, it became necessary to ‘regularise’ this situation by making a ‘scheme’ or a governing document for the charity, a task that the Town Council handed to the Community Buildings Steering Group.

That was in August last year. After negotiations with the Charity Commission, the scheme was agreed by the Steering Group and presented to the Town Council in December; but despite the support of a public meeting held in February, the Council have still not set up the charity. If they do not do so by mid May, they will be in contempt of the High Court Order which directed them to make the scheme.

So much for the potted history. My role in this has been to facilitate the development of a feasible option. I supported the move to the Town Hall, as I believed it had the potential to deliver the facilities the town needs and bring about much needed redevelopment of redundant spaces in the latter building. In hindsight, it took me too long to realise that such a plan would not work; partly due to cost; partly due to lack of public support; partly due to the impossibility of getting a factious Council to ever come to an agreement on the best development option.

I was firmly against the closure of the Community Centre in 2006 and, in partnership with Benji, Paul Jervis and Tim Morgan, came forward at the time with an offer to take on the running of the Centre. The plan was to set up a charity that would take over the lease on the building and keep it open until such time as the Town Council was ready to progress with the project at the Town Hall. Our offer was snubbed. The Town Council made a specious argument about needing to see if there were any other interested parties and then dropped the matter. We did not receive either a written acknowledgment of our offer, or any reason for its rejection.

Similarly, in submitting the finalised ‘scheme’ to the Town Council, seven members of the Community Buildings Steering Group, Richard Beale, Benji, Eamonn Forde, Paul Jervis, Tim Morgan, David Utting and myself, made a further offer to become the first trustees of the new charity, who would take over the management of the Centre until the first AGM of the charity; to be held within twelve months of its establishment. That offer was reiterated at the public meeting held on the 26th of February this year, and the clear majority of people at the meeting voted in favour of it being accepted. Again, we have yet to have any response from the Council.

It is not as if they are inundated with other offers, or have any willingness to be the trustees themselves. It is true that our offer is conditional. No charity can operate such a liability as the Community Centre currently represents without some initial funding support. We require the Town Council to commit to funding the charity for three years, to the sum of £16,000 a year, which is the sum that they are raising from you, council tax payers in Llanidloes this coming year to cover the cost of keeping the building closed. Our aim is to re-open the Community Centre. We have clear ideas about its longer term redevelopment and we have the business acumen and the knowledge of funding streams that can bring about the long desired end of modernising the building and making it pay its way.

That, surely, is what everyone wants? You, as voters, need to ask yourself why the process has proved so difficult and apply a solution.