Bradford Live questions pile up at council meeting

Work on the Bradford Live venue is almost complete - but questions still swirl around its future

Officials are being urged to provide financial transparency over the Bradford Live project amid fears the costs of the city's flagship new music venue could spiral.

The former Odeon Cinema building is in the final stages of being turned into a 3,800-seater venue.

Councillors were keen to ask questions at a meeting this week about who would actually be running the venue when it opens and the relationship between Bradford Council and promoter NEC after reports of problems.

During Tuesday's meeting at Bradford City Hall, the Labour administration was pushed for clarity and to publish key financial numbers associated with the project.

The BBC understands the final cost of the project could climb to £50m in the long term.

The BBC has been told the council has taken on additional borrowing, to the tune of millions and repayable over 20 years - with repayments to be offset partly with ticket revenues.

The costs of the project had previously been placed at between £22m and £25m, funded by a mixture of grants and loans.

Councillor Mike Pollard, finance lead for the opposition Conservatives, said he believed there were "very serious problems with this project".

He asked the council to "confirm how the Revenue Budget...required to cover the total council borrowing for this project, is plausibly to be met from the venue’s operations".

In response, the council's executive member for regeneration Alex Ross Shaw, who also serves as a director for the company running Bradford Live, said: "Part of the funding is in the form of a repayable loan from the council to be repaid with rental income from the property and screen rent."

He said the expectation was that the loan would be repaid, with further funding coming from a council grant which had already been factored into the authority's accounts, as well as other external grant funding.

The former Bradford Odeon Cinema building has been turned into a 3,800 seat arena venue

Pressed further on "what justification can be offered" for withholding the key numbers from the public, Mr Ross-Shaw said he had taken advice from council officers.

"We don’t like to keep anything confidential that doesn’t need to be. So I am sure as and when things can be published, they will be," he added.

Earlier this week, the council told the Telegraph and Argus newspaper it was getting ready to progress the "legal processes relating to handover to the NEC Group".

The NEC has declined to comment on whether it is still involved with the Bradford Live project, despite repeated approaches.

However in April, a spokesperson for Bradford Live told the BBC: “Bradford Live has a contract with the NEC to deliver this venue, and we are working to that contract.”

'Nothing more to add'

At the meeting, Labour council leader Susan Hinchcliffe was also pressed on the situation by Lib Dem group leader Brendan Stubbs, who reminded her she had called the venue a "game changer for the city" in the past.

Ms Hinchcliffe responded: "Works are continuing and being completed shortly at the Odeon and I don't think there's anything more to add to that."

Bradford Live is wholly owned by a company with the same name, which is in turn owned by the council.

New company details for Bradford Live, filed with Companies House last month, confirm that "its intended future activities are lawful".

The company’s last set of full filed accounts, in December 2023, show it had £19m of fixed assets and around £1.8m of borrowing “falling due within one year”.