Forge Island ‘failure’ without RMBC’s £47m

Senior councillors met on Monday to agree the 11th-hour financial switch from seeking private investment to self-funding.

This vote came decades after the first mention of a leisure development on the site, five years after the town centre masterplan was launched — and two weeks before construction begins.

RMBC leader Cllr Chris Read said: “The people who have followed this recently — the need for the council to step in to provide that upfront capital to make sure the scheme goes ahead, and moves quickly — will understand where that has come from.

“The private financier is no longer in a position to do that in light of the wider economic conditions.

“This is about wider factors that we are facing — the whole economy, rather than something specific to us.”

Arc is signed up to run an eight-screen cinema, Travelodge will have a 69-bed hotel and five food and drink outlets have been announced.

But the switch to self-funding was only debated in the council chamber for the first time on September 20.

Cllr Denise Lelliott (pictured), cabinet member for jobs and the local economy, said this week: “Had we not taken this decision and decided to finance it ourselves, I don’t think that Forge Island would have been built out.”

RMBC says putting in the money itself could save “tens of millions of pounds” over 50 years.