Bradford council’s leadership has seen off a vote of no confidence amid growing criticism over its handling of Bradford Live, a £50.5m publicly funded venue that has been completed with no operator in place to run it.
The 3,800-seat Bradford Live building was due to open in November but performances were cancelled when NEC Group, which runs a number of large venues in and around Birmingham, pulled out of the deal.
The venue, a supposed centrepiece of Bradford city of culture 2025, is now standing empty while the council, which will foot the majority – £44m – of the bill looks for another company to take the helm.
The fiasco has echoes of Co-op Live, the new Manchester arena whose launch in April was marred by lengthy delays, cancelled gigs and rescheduled performances, eventually opening in May.
A joint statement by Bradford council and NEC Group in September said a decision had been made by the company that “the venue will be better served by an alternative operator”.
NEC Group has not commented further on what brought about the decision, other than to say the company would focus on its existing business in the Birmingham area “after a strategic review of its business”.
The council’s Labour leadership has faced backlash from within the council; the councillor Rebecca Poulsen, leader of the Conservative group, labelled the saga a “complete embarrassment, to the council and to the city”.
Ahead of a vote of no confidence at a meeting of the full council on Tuesday afternoon, she said she was concerned the building “could sit there for years empty” and there was a lack of transparency from the council in its negotiations with NEC Group and other potential operators, which meant the deal that fell through could not be scrutinised.
She added: “The more public money that has gone into it, the more secretive everything has become. It’s just like a secret society or something.”
Susan Hinchcliffe, the leader of Bradford council, said it had been “very frustrating” to have been obliged to keep the negotiations private but that path had been followed after discussions with lawyers.
She said the council believed it could come to a deal with one of many similar venue management companies so that Bradford Live could be operational during its city of culture celebration in 2025.
She said: “We are now in a position to have further discussions with them about the opportunity. We can’t say more about this at this stage given the commercially sensitive nature of discussions.”
Photographs of the newly refurbished building, which most local people remember as the Bradford Odeon, show sensitively restored original features including a grand regency-revival-inspired ballroom with a vaulted ceiling.
Poulsen said there were no concerns among councillors or the public about the quality of the restoration but “we want it to be open”.
The cinema, the first in the UK to be purpose-built for “talkies”, was the largest cinema outside London when it opened in 1930. It also housed a ballroom, where acts such as the Beatles, the Everly Brothers and the Rolling Stones performed multiple times during the 1960s.
It closed in 2000 and fell into severe disrepair, and there were a number of campaigns to save the building over the years backed by celebrities such as Richard Attenborough, George Clarke, David Hockney and Imelda Staunton.
The Odeon was sold to Bradford council in 2013 for a nominal price of £1, on the condition that £1.32m would be invested in its upkeep and repair.
The vote is in response to a number of issues in the city of Bradford that Poulsen blames on the council’s Labour leadership, including problems with child social care, and “delay after delay after delay” in other infrastructure projects, including a bus station and the new purpose-built Darley Street market, the opening of which has been pushed back several times and is now not due until spring next year.
Bradford council is teetering on the brink of bankruptcy and earlier this year central government agreed a £220m package of loans over the next two years, and allowed the council to use money made from selling assets, such as land and buildings, to support its day-to-day operations.
At the council meeting on Tuesday, Hinchcliffe blamed swingeing Tory cuts to councils, made while increasing the responsibility of councils in expensive areas such as social care.
She said Tory governments had taken hundreds of millions from Bradford council and left the city with “a hole in the ground, a regeneration company that delivered nothing and a crumbling Odeon building”.
She described the vote of no confidence as a “phoney motion” designed to create a crisis at the council where there was not one.
