Town hall restoration to cost extra £76m

The restoration was originally due to be completed in July

Work to restore Manchester's town hall is to cost an extra £76m, councillors have been told.

A Manchester City Council report said the restoration project, which was already over budget by £29m in February, has faced challenges including several claims from contractors.

Members of the council's Executive are to be asked to approve the increase, which would be funded via long-term borrowing, when they meet on 16 October.

Deputy Council Leader, Garry Bridges, said the increased costs were "not where we wanted to be" but stressed it was a "once-in-a-century undertaking" which was set to "benefit the city for many decades to come".

The project is not now due to be completed until summer 2026

Bridges said that "failure to carry out essential work on the town hall, allowing it to slip into disrepair, decay and disuse, would have been more costly in the long-run without creating anything like the same positive legacy for the city".

"This is a testing moment but what the Our Town Hall project will deliver for Manchester will stand the test of time," he added.

But leader of the Liberal Democrat group, Councillor John Leech, said he was "not surprised" by the increased cost, saying it was "symptomatic of the council nearly always overspending on capital projects".

The project to restore the Grade I listed Victorian building on Albert Square was due to be completed in July but delays have meant that this has been pushed back to July 2026.

The original budget for the project was £325m, while the current budget for the project, ahead of any further spending being given the green light later in October, is £353.8m.

'Robustly negotiating'

A report to councillors said the Our Town Hall project had faced "significant challenges", including structural issues and major external events such as the coronavirus pandemic, hyperinflation in the construction industry and the war in Ukraine.

The £49m contingency funding included in the original budget in case of unforeseen events was not enough, a council spokesperson said.

But the biggest cost faced by the council was said to have arisen from financial claims from contractors whose workers had been temporarily stood down or remained on site for longer than originally envisaged.

The council spokesperson said they were "robustly negotiating more than 80 such claims to ensure a fair outcome".

The Our Town Hall update report will be considered by the council’s Resources and Governance Scrutiny Committee on 10 October and its executive on 16 October.

A further progress update is to be made to the resources and governance scrutiny committee in spring 2025.