Bristol Beacon has been valued at zero pounds in the city council’s accounts – and the authority has already written off £39million on the project, it can be revealed. Costs of a massive refurbishment of the building, formerly the Colston Hall, more than doubled just over a year ago from £52.2million to £106.9million after on-site investigations found the crumbling Victorian concert hall’s structure to be a “worst-case scenario”.
That saw Bristol City Council’s share of the bill balloon from £10million to £54.5million which was approved by mayor Marvin Rees’s Labour cabinet in March 2021 with both support from cross-party scrutiny councillors to plough on with the project rather than letting the venue “disintegrate” as well as calls for an inquiry. Conservative Cllr Jonathan Hucker has now crunched the numbers in the authority’s accounts that show, in financial terms, Bristol Beacon is effectively “worthless”.
He says that if the council was operating as a business, this would be a “financial disaster”. In response, the council says the Beacon’s value to the city goes “well beyond the bricks and mortar” because the investment stimulates economic growth, creates jobs and increases tourism.
