A Green councillor accused Labour of “talking down” the i360 seafront attraction which has closed after it was unable to pay its debts.
Green councillor Pete West asked Labour to start “talking up” the i360 in a question to the deputy leader of Brighton and Hove City Council, Jacob Taylor, last night (Thursday 19 December).
But Councillor West’s request was overtaken by events as he asked for assurances that the attraction would reopen after its annual closure for maintenance next month.
Today, i360 Brighton Limited is expected to file for administration, having given notice on Wednesday 27 November that it was intending to appoint administrators.
The council is the company’s largest creditor and is owed £51 million after brokering a £36 million loan in 2014.
Efforts have been made to find a buyer to operate the attraction which was once described as a “vertical pier”.
Councillor West said: “If no one else will take it on, it is surely vital the council keeps it going to avoid the significant costs of mothballing or demolition.
“No one could have predicted the changes to the way people live their lives that covid brought, the impact this would have on visitor attractions and all manner of public gatherings.
“From the outset Labour have talked the attraction down, encouraging public derision, which has impacted visitor numbers and will now be discouraging potential buyers.
“If no buyer is found and the council is left to operate the attraction, will Labour finally find the good sense to start talking the i360 up?”
In July 2019, the former Labour council leader Daniel Yates said: “If we were asked to borrow £38 million for somewhere in the world, where would we know 100,000 a year would be attracted to?
“A 360-degree panorama of what? Herds of wildebeest sweeping majestically across the plains? The Hanging Gardens of Babylon?”
The following year he dubbed the attraction a “doughnut on a stick”.
The current deputy leader, Councillor Taylor, who is also the cabinet member for finance, said that he wanted the i360 to continue operating without further injections of public cash.
He said: “Comments from politicians have not shifted the dial on the number of visitors coming to the i360.
“The problem has been the assumptions about visitor numbers in the original business case being wholly unsustainable.”
“unsustainable” is not the word at all : the correct word is “unrealistic”
The truth of the matter is that the I360 was never going to be financially viable from the very start and was yet another vanity project along with Beryl Bikes and duplicated cycle lanes instigated by the Green Party.
As the comedian Mark Steel once remarked Why pay good money just to see a bit more of the sea than you can see from the bottom of it.
The Greens did not instigate the i360. See posts below from Trevor and Valerie for an accurate description of what has gone on.
And since the Greens have never run anything other than a minority administration they have not ‘instigated’ anything without other parties having agreed to it.
Personally I’d rate the new cycle lanes as necessary infrastructure, given the number of people who now cycle. And the Beryl bikes with the electrical assist are great. If you live up the top of Bear Road you should give one a go.
The only gamble that’s paid off as far as I can see is the one Labour took when they made a strategic decision to U-turn on the loan amount when they were in opposition. Given their support for the i360 from 2006 right up until the year before the local elections in May 2015, they were in support of the project, pushed for it to progress etc.
They also recognised that after the financial crash in 2008 that the i360 would likely not happen unless some public funding via the public works loan board happened, and they kept supporting the project right up until the year before the local elections when they wanted to take back control of the council. With the knowledge that Green and Tory votes alone would be enough not to scupper the project if they voted against, they were safe to make a strategic political decision and hedge their bets. That gamble has paid off. But it’s been quite ugly watching the Labour councillors look almost happy about the way things have panned out, and the fact they always forget to mention how much they championed the project at the outset, and the fact they were happy to sip champagne at the i360 launch (when they had won back control of the council).
Correct. It’s a political win for Labour, but not a pretty one.
Well said. A further detail that was very telling: By 2009 the 2006 planning consent was due to expire. Former BHCC planning officer, Ian Coomber, acting for a giant ferris type wheel company, submitted a Planning Application to site one of these wheels by the West Pier. In 3 years only a few bits of Metal had been fished out of the sea and nothing was built! Warning bells anyone?
BHCC Lawyers did not allow the planning application to lapse and it is a contentions issue whether the following legal advice was right or wrong. Digging bits of West Pier metal out of the sea bed deemed the planning consent ‘implemented’. The i360 carried on being unbuilt, with rumours of the steel cans for the pole having been traced, rusting in a Dutch yard. So six years from planning consent it was known there was not enough Financial backing to assemble the i360. The loans saga then began…! And private financial backing retreated and disappeared completely.
Every political party in Brighton and Hove has egg on its face and is culpable at some stage of this whole sorry story – from 2005/6 on when the Labour Party administration provided planning consent.
Another Green councillor obviously smoking the Green. It’s difficult to talk anything up when it’s £50 million in debt and visitor numbers are plummeting! At least labour had sense enough to realise that when private finance wanted nothing to do with this, securing a huge loan against the local taxpayer was totally irresponsible.
Just look at the numbers. You do not need to be an accountant. The basic definition of a business is where the money in is bigger than the money out. They were running at a loss, never able to repay the loans.
Even if they had no loans they would have struggled.
The loans outstanding at end of June 2023 were £67 Million.
Interestingly then Green Councillor Tom Druitt, when on a financial committee recommended that the council should see and agree a realistic recovery plan before lending/extending more credit. He was sidelined by his own party.
99.9% of the people they needed to be visiting and using the attraction would have no knowledge of or interest in the opinion of any local councillors. It didn’t fail because the council weren’t talking it up enough. It failed because it was a bad idea from the start, the numbers never added up and people didn’t want it.
This whole blame game is ridiculous because the fact is it was never seen as a good idea by anybody with any sense of business acumen and wasn’t even popular with locals, before it was even approved.
By every measure it was never going to work and yet approval was given, at significant cost to us local tax payers, without our opinions ever being sought or respected.
It would be bad enough approving a pointless boondoggle like this with private money, but to do so loaning tens of millions of local tax payers’ money we will never see again is frankly criminal. There should be a full public inquiry into how this was ever allowed to happen and on what basis it was ever considered of any value to the people who paid for it, us locals.
Tear it down, sell the metal for scrap and let us never speak of it again unless we can hold those responsible to account.
Has Pete West managed to squeeze more cash out of the council to support his personal hobby horse The Wood store before it calls in administrators? Greens couldn’t run a bath as we now see writ large to over 50 million.
be aware theres a petition on the uk parliament petition page call a general election read it carefully to be aware of the facts it currently has 2,993,785signaturesit urgently needs many more asap..consider signing it also consider resharing it widely all over the uk but by e mails only as they cant be censored or suppressed but shh your not supposed know that. if resharing it be sure to ask each one you contact with it to do exactly the same as ive asked you in this message
I am no fan of the Greens.
But it has to be said that the i360 made Brighton an attractive tourist destination.
I took my family on the i360. We all enjoyed the experience together with other visitors.. It was a very good day.
Yes – I accept it made no financial sense. But on that basis many other attractions, like The Royal Pavilion & Palace Pier would never have been built.