Secret report reveals that Reading Borough Council turned down bids to reopen Arthur Hill for public swimming

• Bids to reopen the pool for swimming and community use were not shortlisted by the Council.
• The winning bid to buy the pool was not the highest offer received by the Council.
• A recommendation that the Council should remarket the pool if the purchaser does not perform to an acceptable timescale has been ignored.

Reading Borough Council has finally revealed full details of the controversial sale of East Reading’s historic Arthur Hill swimming pool to campaigners following a year long Freedom of Information battle.

The Council has released a copy of a secret report giving details of the sale to the Arthur Hill campaign, and a copy is now available at the bottom of this article.

The report reveals that the offer which the Council accepted for the property – a £1.150 million bid from local company OOAK Developments – was not the highest offer received from potential buyers. The Council decided to accept an unconditional offer from OOAK Developments in the hope that it would receive cash for the sale more quickly than if it had to negotiate over a conditional offer. However, nearly one year after the decision what is described in the report as “the certainty of an early receipt” has failed to materialise, and the sale to OOAK has not been concluded.

The Council had intended to sign a contract for the sale of the pool within eight weeks of last July’s Policy Committee meeting, and to have cash from the sale in the bank by the end of December 2018. However, these deadlines have long since passed and the Council is unable to say when the deal will be concluded.

Despite a recommendation that if the purchaser does not perform at an acceptable timescale, then the Council should either re-engage with the second highest bidder or re-market the property, no efforts have been made to review the sale decision.

The report noted that OOAK developments is “a young company of limited experience” and warned that although an unconditional offer might result in an earlier payment, “in reality the purchaser will often try and delay exchange to carry out some risk mitigation or will try and introduce what are effectively conditions into the deal. Also the sale price is usually lower than a Conditional sale and the Council as Vendor has no control over the end use or benefits from any value uplift that may result”.

The report reveals that three of the potential buyers had planned to reopen the pool for swimming, and that a fourth bidder, the Greater Reading Nepalese Community Association, planned to buy it for community use. None of these bids made it to the final shortlist, which consisted of a proposal to develop the site for housing by OOAK Developments and another housing proposal from rival company Red Line Developments.

The offers from potential purchasers appear to have been subject to much less scrutiny than an earlier bid from the Arthur Hill Save Our Swimming Community Interest Company which was submitted to the Council soon after Arthur Hill was closed to run the pool on an interim basis until a new pool is built. Disappointingly, the Council has been willing to extend deadlines and give the benefit of the doubt to a private property developer in a way that it was not prepared to do when considering the community bid to run the pool.

The secret report was discussed at the Council’s Policy Committee meeting in July 2018, and was the subject of a Freedom of Information request from supporters of the Arthur Hill campaign. The request was originally refused by the Council, but following an appeal the Information Commissioner ordered that the Council must release a copy of the report or face proceedings for contempt of court.

The Council has finally released the report less than a week before the Information Commissioner’s final deadline for releasing the report expires.

A spokesperson for the Arthur Hill campaign said: “Reading Borough Council’s handling of the sale of Arthur Hill Pool has been monumentally incompetent. The Council has failed to get the highest price offered for the property; failed to find a reputable buyer, and has so far failed to sell the pool.

“At the same time, it has failed to make any progress at all in building a new swimming pool in Reading.

“This report raises some very worrying questions about how the winning bidder was selected and why, despite not yet having received a single penny for the pool from the prospective buyer, the Council has not put the pool back on the market.

“We have now entered the third year since Arthur Hill Pool was closed by Labour councillors, and the Council’s dreams for a new swimming pool are no nearer to reality than they were when Arthur Hill was closed. If the Council had been prepared to work with the community to keep Arthur Hill open, school children and families in East Reading would still be able to enjoy swimming locally and the pool would still be serving local people over the forthcoming summer holidays”.

 

Download the Council report and its appendices here:

Policy Committee Report 160718

Policy committee report Appendix 1 160718

Policy committee report Appendix 2 160718

Policy committee report Appendix 2A 160718