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In 2004Lewisham Council announced plans to demolish Ladywell Leisure Centre in 2007 - we saved it! The pool will stay open until the forecast replacement is ready.  Sadly the plan is awfully inadequate and instead of being a plan for a community sport and leisure centre it is a plan for a lifestyle pool for the new residential developments to be built in front of Lewisham Station.

The following pages are maintained by the SAVE LADYWELL POOL CAMPAIGN who can be contacted on ladywellpool@hotmail.com

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 Mo, Aug 15, 2005

Downham £4.5M over budget before works start


Rumour has it that Lewisham Council is about to finally sign the contract for the Downham Lifestyles Centre.

This project initially had a construction budget of £10.5M.

This had to be topped up to £13M because of added inflationary costs.

Last week it emerged that in between the start of negotiations and now Lewisham Council found the way to also spend at least £876,000 on consultants.

It is now known that the contract that Lewisham Council is about to sign includes a further increase in the price to be paid to the Leisure Connection led consortium for the running of the facility.

Apparently this increase is of about £40,000 per year.

As the contract runs for 30 years this totals a £1.2M increase.

So, let's recap:

  • first overspend ........................ £2.5M
    (inflationary costs incurred as negotiations stalled)
  • second overspend....................£876,000
    (we consider the consultants costs as all overspending. Lewisham Council has a large number of officers handsomely paid to reflect their experience and professional value. If their wages are anything to measure them by, they could have been able at least to sort out a contract without asking for help from expensive expert consultants that, at the end, produced as result a contract that delivers the last overspend of the pre-construction period of this saga)
  • third overspend............................£1.2M
    (increased price for the running of the facility, £40k for 30 years running)
  • Total overspend..................................£4,576,000

    • This overspend has all accumulated since Lewisham Council decided on the Leisure Connection bid as the one to go for in July 2003.

    The very worrying thing is that the Council at least had a plan for this centre. Unlike for the replacement for Ladywell that still has no concrete plan.
    Would you trust them to demolish the Ladywell Leisure Centre before the replacement is delivered?

    This time they seem to have found the money to cover this impressive hole. If things go on like this there will be very little money left to cover future holes in the building programs of Lewisham Council.
    And the more ambitious they are, the riskier they get. ...read more...

    Posted by webmaster in Downham Lifestyles Project | # | Discuss | Comment [0] |