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 2 of 4).
Beacon Park is a Donald Steel-designed creation located a mile from the centre of Skelmersdale, halfway between Ormskirk and Wigan. It was built at a time when the interest in golf in the UK was reaching a whole new level, opening in 1982.
In the early days it was council owned and run but in the 90s West Lancashire Borough Council, following the lead from other local authorities, took the decision to lease the course and its running to a specialist.
The first outsourcing deal (we have been able to confirm) was done in 2000 with DCT Leisure, an Altrincham-based company, whose origins were in engineering. They were one of four companies who wanted the job. The council would receive £35,000 per year and in 2005, now under the stewardship of Mark Prosser, it renewed the lease for a further five years with an option to sign up for a a further decade, taking them up to 2020.
The tenant, having proved its worth, wanted a longer lease to give them the opportunity to plan further course upgrades. A council report from 2005 outlined that since DCT had taken over, it had invested £120,000 into the course and the company wanted the time to recoup that money back.
The report also commended DCT Leisure for its strategy and noted that since ‘the all-time lows’ of the late 1990s, there had been a 30% increase in round numbers by 2005.
Everything appeared to be going well.
Five years later the first option to extend the lease was taken up but signs the company was in trouble appeared when no annual report for 2010 was submitted to Companies House and, in the end, unpaid VAT led to the company being wound up. It was officially dissolved on August 9th, 2013.
It left WLBC with a big problem, especially as in 2011, DCT had agreed a deal with a company that takes unwanted landfill and uses it to reshape golf courses. Done well, the process can add considerable character to a lay-out. The company who who would bring the landfill was Oakland Golf and Leisure, run by Leeds-based Jonathan Snellgrove.
Snellgrove had previously run into trouble with Knowsley Metropolitan Borough Council (KMBC) over a scheme to redevelop Cottage Homes Playing Fields in Fazakerley that gained planning permission in September 2009. Five years later, The UK Sports Parks Limited company, of which he was a director, was served with five breaches of various planning and enviromental regulations. The lease agreement was also terminated.
Those breaches were:
• Failure to complete the development within the agreed 3-year timescale
• Failure to follow proper procedures when importing soil and secure a well-managed safe community access to the sports facility
• Failure to comply with a top-soil removal condition within the agreed timescale
• Unexplained damage to security fencing/hoardings and security gates
AND
• Failure to remove material containing asbestos withing 14 days of an abatement notice
For the asbestos-based breach, UK Sports Parks Limited was fined and incurred the costs of KMBC removing the dangerous material itself.
The council never received the £8,304 it demanded with UK Sports Parks Limited being dissolved in April 2016. Winding up proceedings had voluntarily started started in July 2014 with liquidators establishing the company owed £121,029, of which £100,000 was unpaid VAT.
In January 2012 Serco Leisure, which was already running three leisure centres for WLBC, agreed to take on Beacon Park and the council also eased the financial pressure by changing the terms of the lease so no annual payment would be required.
A WLBC council report from 2013 also outlined that ‘Serco have now concluded their discussions with Oaklands Leisure and have been able to project a positive financial position in future years. However the initial years of the improvement works will require Serco to cover operating losses’.
However if the members thought, things were going to improve, they were in for the shock of their lives.
> THE STORY CONTINUED (part 3 of 4): A Beacon of Despair – The landfill arrives years (2013-2018)
< PREVIOUS (part 1 of 4): A Beacon of Despair – An Introduction
ALSO…
• Beacon Park – a view by Mark Flanagan
• Who are Oakland Golf and Leisure?
• How landfill deals work
Do you have any information on what happened at Beacon Park? If so email [email protected]