I can say a bit more about the proposal a group of us have been working on. Our team is four professional local people with relevant skills whose sole purpose is to save the wharf for community use and community ownership. For a year we’ve been working on a full professional business plan, which is complete. This has been fully worked up, with cash flow and business projections but let me stress this would be a community enterprise – community owned and run. The plan has a cafe and heritage room on the ground floor (available for community room hire) and a health and fitness centre on the top floor. We have local business partners committed to both who have helped us work up business projections including income, operation and so on. The building is in a very poor state and it needs to be renovated and used. There is quite a bit of cash needed to get it into any sort of use and then more to turn it into anything else. Plus it will need planning permission in all events – a heritage centre needs planning permission under the same overall planning rules as housing, so it is quite crucial the reasons why the application has been turned down, especially if the reasons apply to all types of use (parking and traffic issues for example). If these apply to heritage use, then a big difficulty has been created by turning down the planning application, as it will mean the building simply can't be used for anything at all so will be lost to the community. If we can’t get planning approval, we won’t get grants either. Our plan saves the building and gives it our best shot to run it for the benefit of the whole community. If it fails it won’t be for lack of trying to do something positive and if it fails it will still belong to the community, and to Marple!
We have had assistance from the council, both in looking at the business aspects and at the finances, plus practical support on how to run a heritage shop and what throughput and income we could expect. We have a structural engineer in our team and have had pro bono help of architects, accountants and surveyors.
We have successfully brought the CRT along with us and have outline heads of agreement and a price for purchase, all done prior to the planning application. They had agreed that if they obtained planning permission they would do nothing, but would instantly pause for a considerable period to let us raise money for the building and guarantee to sell it to the community if we reached the price agreed.
Our aim would be to supplement grant money we can obtain by being a community enterprise, with public share subscription – for residents not big business! This would need to be secured by the ownership of the building and a fall back if the enterprise fails, so that investors have security. One writer is correct to say this sort of enterprise is prone to failure, which is why we have a robust plan that has been tested and assessed, and uses the experience locally of the Northumberland Arms which has been very successful in its first year. We are forming our legal community company now, but need to work through how to get planning approval. If there are people with relevant skills who are genuinely committed to this sort of plan, we welcome interest.
