MEETING TO DISCUSS FUTURE OF SALISBURY CITY HALL
A number of residents met in Mill Road last week to form a team to support the re-opening of Salisbury City Hall. I support their objectives. Here are the edited minutes...
1. XXXXX took the Chair in an Interim role. Those present introduced themselves and something of their background and interest in the future of City Hall.
2. XXXXX explained his own background and experience in working with a wide range of local authorities and the LGA on the commercialisation of local authority services. He spoke to the challenges in the present situation where Wiltshire Council had decided to go to the open market and seek a commercial operator for City Hall. He suggested that the priority for discussion was to agree our desired outcomes and establish the route to market for a community group under the banner of providing Social Value, as required in law (Public Services Social Value Act 2012).
3. In discussion the group established a consensus around the following for City Hall
Desired Outcomes
· We greatly wish to see City Hall reopening as an entertainment venue
· We fully understand the need for it to be commercially viable, which requires people with a commercial background to operate it.
· We want to work in partnership with a range of people locally already working in arts and entertainments, both professional and amateur
· The range of spaces in the building offers opportunities for working closely with the wider community both to add social value but also to diversify and maximise income streams. There are ambitions within the group to develop links with young people, the local music scene, the wealth of community groups in the City, with education, a community café. These community activities themselves create a market. This work might be defined by measures such as differential rates, percentages of space or time to be offered to community activities. All of this would be part of the Business Plan and development programme
· The shared ambition was to achieve a sustainable self financing organisation effectively managed.
How we want to work
· Our great strength lies in the social value we bring to the table and our ability to harness the power of the Salisbury community
· As a group whose members individually have a great deal of skills and experience but is currently without a corporate identity, track record or even a bank account, we were unlikely to be successful in the current competitive bidding process. The timescale of the current market engagement exercise makes forming a suitable corporate body impracticable.
· We wished to support not disrupt the process, finding ways to influence it
· We want to look for partnering opportunities with potential operators and approach any or all of them stressing the added value that we bring
· However we could provide a back-up solution in the event of failure of the current market exercise by working towards a CIC, CIO model.
· We well understand that there is no quick fix and that a successful model will take time to develop.