THEATRE ROYAL DEAL COMPLETED
SHOWS OVER
The sale has now apparently gone through on the Theatre Royal yesterday, and many years of hard work are about to be wasted by that same dead hand of municipal inactivity that spent millions on the Marks & Spencer building last year and despite vague mumbles about some indeterminate purpose for the building a year on nothing; just like the Tories who came back to rule Thanet council with the big ideas, what they never told us was the big ideas, would be coming from consultants’ and we would be footing the bill.
So what do we know of the future, well first things first, we know by experience that the councils, top priority is to appoint a consultant because just like there counterparts at Kent council in Maidstone they seem clueless, second now that they are in the driving seat they need to apply the handbrake, switch the engine off, lock up and walk away to return in six months.
Now in plain language, this is for the hard of thinking, in the ruling Tory group, what would a business man normally do, with an enterprise they have just purchased do they A/ build on the goodwill of the business by keeping it running as they seek to capitalise on the investment or do they B/ close the business immediately and cease trading for 6 months thus not only eroding the customer base but also kissing goodbye to revenue, that will never be recovered.
This is yet another example of what is often thought as the Tory party the party of business and enterprise, showing how in practice the couldn’t sell water in a desert, during a heat wave, least not without a consultant.
We read how much the council are putting into this enterprise but just how much is going to the consultants and how much revenue is being lost to the Theatre by closing now rather than continue opening.
Theatre should be subsidised, I understand that the Marlowe in Canterbury gets somewhere in the region £600,000. This the second oldest theatre in the country and to date has had the best part of damn all. The council can always find money for security cameras to protect business premises and waste money on complete nonsense like Manston Virginia (£40,000 down the toilet).
Please whoever gets to run the council in May, spend money on people who live here, not on consultants. Its tragic that people are losing their jobs and Thanet is losing an asset which through hard work and dedication has steadily improved these last few years despite miserly support from the council.
Tony, the money has already been sppent on consultants, hired by the trustees with grants from KCC and TDC, amongst others, to get us to where we are today - with a business plan for a theatre with a solid future.
ReplyDeleteContinuing as it was was never an option, even for the existing trust. £600,000 per year was never an option for Thanet - though some local authority regular funding was missing and is now in place.
I sympathise with many of your views on this, and it has been a very difficult time to get a positive message across about the theatre against a pretence that all was well, when clearly it was not.
This phase is now over. It is not the intention of any council to directly run this theatre and we can all now make our voices heard about the reconstructed version. We all have to look forward not bachward.
I accept, councils of all political colours over the last decade have probably not given the theatre the priority it desrved. However, there are always numbers of competing claims on council resources, and decisions on what is a priority always has winners and losers.
In financial terms, the theatre royal emerges from this as a winner....we all have to make sure the programme and shape of that future is appropriate to the local audience.
PS Actual loss for TDC on Virginia was £10,000 - the £40,000 figure was the budget for the full programme
ReplyDeletePerhaps, Cllr Wells, you could explain the reasoning behind so many assets being scooped up by the council? Is it TDC's intention to join the development boom here in Thanet? Is the idea to buy up cheap and sell on dear?
ReplyDeleteIt looks suspiciously like a property portfolio to me, run under the cover of 'public interest'. Is that what a council's for? If these assets are eventually sold off, will the profit go towards restoring currently much neglected public assets such as the West Cliff Hall here in Ramsgate, or our burnt out library? Or maybe, like those examples, they'll just be left to rot?
Like many people, I really struggle to understand the motivation behind these purchases, apart from giving someone in TDC a new train set to play with.
The reasoning here is very simple. The Theatre Royal was going under and the council had the opportunity to use some government granted funds to purchase the theatre, free the trustees of the burden of debt they were under, and then lease the theatre back to a trustee body to continue with the theatre royal as part of our community. If the theatre had gone under with substantial debts, then the odds on property developers laying hands on it were much increased. We can argue about the lack of support for this theatre previously, the speed of this move, mainly driven by funding timescales, but there is no hidden agenda of acquisition. I say again, I do not as a councillor want to be responsible for maintaining this theatre, it is by definition a money pit.
ReplyDeleteThe Marks and Spencer building again was bought through accessing grants from government funded bodies. I am one who is insisiting that whatever is done there is permanent and saleable on to maintain the fund we have acquires to work on another building or regeneration scheme. I am as frustrated with timescales as any of you, but there is no secret agenda, no conspiracy, although I accept it makes for a great fiction. If you want great fiction, read some of the stuff put out by Clive Hart!
Cllr W, I accept that there's no conspiracy at work. Actually I'm much more of a subscriber to the cock-up theory of local government.
ReplyDeleteYou only have to see what a terrific success the council is making of its assets here in Ramsgate (flogging off tennis courts and Albion House, allowing West Cliff Hall to rot and the East Cliff to crumble) to know that there probably isn't enough intelligence or acumen at TDC to muster a conspiracy!
I understand that a quiet a bit of leverage may well have been used in order for the council to gain control of the theatre.
ReplyDeleteThe winter gardens rarely has a full house and presumably the growing audience for the theatre royal was begining to show the lack lustre performance of Thanet leisure force.
ReplyDelete