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17
Dec
£7 million upgrade for Harrogate Convention Centre approved
Councillors approved a £7 million upgrade of Harrogate Convention Centre at a meeting in Northallerton today.
North Yorkshire Council’s Conservative executive agreed to spend the money on creating more break-out facilities, which it says could generate an extra £1.5 million income a year.
The ageing centre made a £1.9 million loss in 2023/24 – down from £2.6 million in 2022/23. But the council estimates it generates £45 million annually for the local economy, especially hospitality.
It paid London consultants 31ten to come up with options on how to operate the site after shelving previous plans for a huge refurbishment costing tens of millions of pounds.
The consultants’ conclusions were contained in a council report, which you can read here, published before the meeting. However, the consultants' full report and findings have been kept secret from the public.
Councillors agreed today to accept the consultants’ recommended option to spend £7 million on creating break-out facilities in studio two, which they believe will attract more conferences and generate an additional £1.5 million annual income.
Harrogate Convention Centre
The council will also seek commercial partners for the site, but its report said there was a “limited market” of private operators and they hadn’t shown much interest so far.
Centre director Paula Lorimer told the meeting council-owned venues typically operated as wholly-owned companies to reduce costs but developers believed the convention centre site was “constrained and has a number of covenants”.
She added:
Local authority venues only tend to appoint private operators if a large arena or large hotel complex is available on the site. Harrogate Convention Centre has neither of these.
The 2,000-seat auditorium
Ms Lorimer said creating more flexible breakout seminar spaces would attract larger conferences of 800 delegates and above. “Currently Harrogate Convention Centre only has breakout space for 550 delegates even though the venue has an auditorium capacity of 2,000,” she added.
Studio two is currently an empty hall with a current occupancy level of just 2% so the scheme would “utilise an under-productive area that already exists,” she said, adding:
What we don’t need to do is build a new conference centre or a new conference hall. Just fit out the rooms and provide an escalator so that the area can be accessed which is the issue with the area at the moment.
Harrogate Convention Centre accounts
Ms Lorimer said it had always been her vision to “get Harrogate Convention Centre to a break-even position” and she was confident this would achieve it.
But she added the council also needed to tackle a “backlog of urgent repairs” at the increasingly dilapidated site, which is one of the largest carbon emitting buildings in North Yorkshire.
Ms Lorimer said utility costs had accounted for half of the taxpayer subsidy. She said this was a “shocking figure” but costs were falling and lettings income had increased by 21% since 2020.
'Show us your money'
Council deputy leader Gareth Dadd said the convention centre had been a “knotty issue” but backed the plans.
He criticised Harrogate Borough Council, which spent £2 million on consultants’ fees for the planned huge refurbishment that never found funding. He said the “old borough council plan was touted at £50 million” but in reality it would cost more like £100 million and added:
It was growing out of control and clearly it was undeliverable. The business case did not stack up.
To close it and to walk away with it would be disastrous for Harrogate and I for one am not prepared to risk that.
Today's executive meeting
Cllr Michael Harrison, who represents Killinghall, Hampsthwaite and Saltergate, also backed the proposal and took a swipe at those who call for the venue to be sold — an option the council will continue to consider.
He said:
To everybody who doesn’t bother reading papers but says. ‘oh, we should sell it or get someone else to run it,’ well that’s option 5. Great. Let’s see if it’s ever a viable option. Bring it on. But I’m not going to spend a great deal of time waiting. That’s on the table. That’s the answer to people who say, ‘oh, someone else can do it better than us’. Go on then. Show us your money. It’s not there, is it? So I welcome this and I will be supporting it.
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