Lancashire club Beacon Park is set to close next month after more than 40 years in business. Managing Editor MARK FLANAGAN tells the extraordinary story of how, during the last ten years, a golf club and its course were inexplicably ruined (part 3 of 4).
On the 13th July, 2011, a planning application was submitted to West Lancashire Borough Council by ‘Beacon Park Gold and Country Club’. Yes you did read that right – those are the exact words taken from the official documentation. The application was made up of 24 documents and promised a bold new future for Beacon Park.
The scheme involved 187,000 cubic metres of landfill being placed on the course in four phases. The process would take two years and the practice range would become a nine-hole academy course while large swathes of the course would be transformed:
• Phase 1: The fifth, sixth, 13th and 14th remodelled using 55,000m3 of landfill.
• Phase 2: The driving range would receive 35,000m3 to improve moulding and provide targets.
• Phase 3: 65,000m3 would be desposited on the practice range to facilitate the building of a nine-hole academy course
• Phase 4: The first and second would also be improved using 32,000m3 plus there would be a ‘ridge’ added between the first and ninth.
The plans also made it clear that the landfill would only rise to a maximum of 6.5 metres where more moulding was needed on the lower western side. In one of the conclusions, the WLBC case officers said: “Such works are significant and will be noticeable in parts. Despite this, given the undulating nature of the golf course and the dispersal of the works over a substantial area of land, I consider that the works will not be viewed in isolation and will merge into the landscape, thereby maintaining the openness and visual amenity of the Green Belt.”
It was a huge deal, not least on a financial level. Prosser had told staff the deal with Oaklands was worth “millions” although just how many millions has never been disclosed and nobody from Serco, WLBC or Oakland Golf & Leisure is willing to discuss it. From discussions with industry experts, Golfnews24 has been able to discern that the overall deal would have been worth around £4m.
On December 12th, 2011, Borough planner John Harrison granted planning permission with a number of ‘conditions’. This is standard practice in such matters but one of them (No 9) stated – ‘No development shall take place in connection with phases 3 and 4 until works in connection with phases 1 and 2 have been completed and the northern temporary access road has been closed and the land reinstated to its former use’.
Nineteen days later DCT Leisure informed the council they had to relinquish their lease.
Just one month later Serco took over.
Serco is as global enterprise. Its UK-based Leisure division, according to its own website, operates 49 facilities nationally on behalf of 17 local authories. Mostly these are leisure centres.
However it has no experience in golf. In fact Dave Sharp, the first Serco ‘manager’ at Beacon Park, had never held a golf club in his life.
Serco did think there was money to be made. Instead of the council being guaranteed an income, WLBC agreed to what amounted a profit share. It would get a third of ‘surplus income’ while Serco, under it various guises, would get the rest. The Serco lease would run until March 21st 2020 and it was estimated that all the Oakland Leisure work would enhance the value of the course by £500,000.
In 2013 the first trucks carrying landfill started arriving but instead of accessing the top of the course near the sixth hole to start work on phase one, all the landfill went elsewhere. That was straight onto the driving range (phase 2) plus the practice ground (phase 3), constituting a clear breach of the planning regulations.
Quite why nothing was done to challenge what was going remains unclear. In fact trying to establish a number of important facts in this case has proved very difficult.
When golfnews24 submitted a number of questions to Serco, it only provided the following statement, after it had been cleared by West Lancashire Borough Council: “Serco took over management of the course in 2012 at the request of West Lancashire Borough Council, as the previous operator had given notice to quit due to the course being a loss-making business.
“In 2010, previous to Serco taking over, a landfill planning application and any related royalties were granted in the name of Oaklands Golf & Leisure Ltd, which we subsequently inherited. Although we have steadily built up membership numbers post-COVID, this is still a loss making concern and we therefore fully understand the Council’s reasoning behind the decision to close the business in March and will support them in the transition period.”
Later in 2013 long-time golf pro Gary Nelson quit after he was told he had to help out behind the bar or be fired and the following year the pro shop was closed. It meant if you wanted to book golf you had to go into the bar. Word quickly got around that the checks to ensure people had paid before arriving on the first tee had stopped happening. Who knows how many hundreds and possibly thousands of golfers played the course for free over the intervening years.
In 2012 Beacon Park’s income was officially £294,881. By 2015 it was £192,396.
The continuing dumping of landfill wasn’t probably helping either and members were getting fed up. Many left. From a high of 280 in 2012, officially membership would drop to 180 by December 2021 although only 40 of those were what golfers would understand as Beacon Park Golf Club members in that they paid their fees to the Lancashire Golf Union and were eligible to play in county competitions.
They had been told the overhaul of Beacon Park would last 24 months yet neither Serco or Oakland Golf Leisure seemed very interested in sticking to this timeline and the council appeared uninterested in making sure their tenants did their job.
There was, however, one significant investment made by Serco.
In a letter to a Beacon Park committee member, sent in early 2019, the then Serco Group CEO Rupert Soames disclosed the amount of money Serco had got from the landfill arrangement with Oaklands (£183,864) and added that ‘we have reinvested over £42,000 into a Junior Play Area and fencing on the site’.
Soames also wrote: ‘The works for this commenced in late 2012 and took 5 years to complete, which is significantly longer that the initially estimated timeline of 2 years. During this time Oaklands Ltd desposited 153,000 cubic metres of material on Beacon Park, well within the original planning consent of 187,000 cubic metres’.
Complete? What at Beacon Park had been completed?
As the disquiet grew into full-blown anger, by 2016 the pressure really started to mount on Serco while the council was struggling to get its story straight. There were also more general concerns raised with club captain Tom Jackson telling Wigan Today: “People were coming from outside the area, playing nine holes and then asking for their money back.
“Greens have got to be well maintained, fed and watered, and they’ve only just started doing that. There’s a lot of money involved in keeping greens.”
Campaigners started filing Freedom of Information requests and were being given different answers to the same questions.
Local MP Rosie Cooper got involved and the local media increasingly picked up the story with reporter Alan Lenton leading from the front. The sight of a 15-metre high wall of landfill near to a prominent road in the area left golf members and local residents wondering what was happening.
And it was only in 2018, five years after the landfill started arriving, did the council finally act in what must go down as one of the biggest dereliction of duties in the history of British landowning.
That was the year Serco was finally forced into doing something with it although quite why it or landlords WLBC didn’t force ‘industry specialists’ Oakland Golf & Leisure to put the landfill in places outlined in the 2011 plan remains a mystery. However no one from Serco, WLBC or Oakland will discuss why the landfill was just put in two places and never on the course.
In May 2018, West Lancashire Borough Council served a Breach of Condition Notice.
An official WLBC statement said: ‘It is only in the case of the former driving range, however, that the non-compliance with the approved plan is deemed so significant as to warrant the council taking action. During the deposit of material, the council contacted the Environment Agency to ensure that proper monitoring of the type of material being brought on to the site was in place.’
Serco had six months to put things right and a hastily-arranged planning applications by Serco effectively got rid of the original phase 1 and instead of a nine-hole academy course, Beacon Park would get a foot golf facility but so much landfill had been put on the driving range, the practice ground would have to take some of it.
Cooper told local reporters: “What has been going on with Beacon Park golf course over many years has been a disgrace and it is timely that action is at last being taken to rectify the situation but this doesn’t end the matter.
“I will continue to pursue this matter as there should be proper accountability by those who made these poor decisions which I believe led to a loss of revenue to WLBC and its council taxpayers from both the course and the proceeds from the amount of rubble and waste materials which have been dumped.”