Calderdale Council and the Town Deal Board have, last week, taken the decision to withdraw support and funding for the Riverside Project.

See Press Release on the Calderdale Council News website.

Since September last year, we have faced a concerted effort by Calderdale Council officers and some Town Deal board members to undermine our project by suggesting that it fails to meet the visitor economy outcomes in the original business case, but we dispute this.

The UCVR have a long-standing involvement in the visitor economy, and we probably understand this element of the economy better than any Town Deal Board member. However, they have taken the decision to withdraw the Town Deal funding on the false premise that this was an original key element of the project, whilst not recognising that their own visitor survey indicates that the vast majority of visitors we would and will still attract are day visitors to the town and area.

In making this decision, they have also suggested that the emphasis is too community-oriented.

This is a strange position to take, being as you only have to look at the project on the Town Deal website to see that the outcomes were always prominently community, sports, health and welfare oriented. That remains our priority and was dominant in the business case.

As stated in the Calderdale Council press release, we faced economic inflationary challenges like everyone else, and we have revised our cost and the business case accordingly in recent weeks.

We proposed value engineering cuts, which we believe brought the project within budget whilst maintaining 90% of the outcomes of our business case. As the press release stated, this was independently assessed. The assessor actually suggested that, from a public funding point of view, it still provided “value for money”.

With officers calling our contractors directly and reporting hearsay to the Town Deal Board as facts, we suspected that officers and some board members were actively working to withdraw support for Riverside, whatever we proposed in our revised plans.

And we expressed those concerns to the council political leadership in February. So it is even more surprising that Cllr Sarah Courtney has supported this Town Deal decision with a statement, having assured us face to face just weeks ago that the officers were fully supportive of the project.

This decision and the process leading to it via the council’s programme board highlight for us some wider political and governance issues around the influences of the council over what was intended to be an independent private sector-led Town Deal Board. But that’s for another forum.

This decision has been dropped on us with no consideration for our obligations to clients and stakeholders who should have heard this from us, not a council press release. This is just another crass way in which this has been handled by the council and Town Deal.

We will be taking legal advice now and will update our position here in a few weeks.

In the meantime, our users and key stakeholders have been reassured that we will continue to provide what facilities we can until the position is clarified further, and we will not be cancelling any events in 2025.