A £100m sports strategy to create new facilities across the Island has already been confirmed by the government.
Fort Regent is expected to be turned into an entertainment and cultural venue, with work to accommodate Islanders and clubs who use the site for sport elsewhere. A public consultation has been launched to gather the public’s views on these plans.
The Chief Minister, during yesterday’s States sitting, said the government was not committing to any ‘significant sums at this stage’, which he said would require the approval of the House. He refused to confirm the potential figure for the redevelopment.
Senator Kristina Moore told Members that Islanders had contacted her and other Scrutiny members to express ‘intense frustration and concern over the accumulative effect’ of capital projects, with ‘over £1.5 billion planned to be spent’ in the immediate capital-spending plan.
The cost of Fort Regent’s redevelopment into a cultural centre had not been revealed, she said, but was ‘rumoured to be in excess of £250 million’.
At the sitting, Deputy Graham Truscott said this was the second time he had heard that spending figure being proposed for Fort Regent, calling it an ‘eye-watering’ sum and ‘quite staggering’.
Responding to this comment, Chief Minister John Le Fondré said: ‘What we are not doing with Fort Regent is committing to huge sums of money at this stage.
‘That would fairly obviously have to be an Assembly decision.’
He said that in the Government Plan there were ‘relatively small sums’ of roughly between £5 and £8 million agreed. He said this would be used for smaller-scale projects at the Fort, such as putting the gardens ‘into a good state’ before ministers worked out ‘how to address all the legacy bits’. He added that there had been a ‘sheer lack of investment in that building for a very long time’.
‘It is about putting the soul back into Fort Regent,’ said Senator Le Fondré. ‘We are not committing to the significant sums that have been bounded around. What we are saying is we need to have a long-term strategy. This is starting to set the foundations on that.’
