Council bosses have approved a £1.8m budget for repairs to the harbour wall of Scarborough’s West Pier to extend its lifespan.
Neom Engineering Limited has been awarded a construction contract to extend the lifespan of the West Pier, including repairing and strengthening the steel sheet-piled wall along the harbour-facing section of the structure.
According to officers, the estimated cost of the works is £1.2m and any additional project costs, including potential compensation events’ beyond the contractor’s control, and inflation over the estimated value allowed for, are “at the council’s risk”.
As such, a contingency of £546,000 has been included, along with a £15,000 budget for internal staffing costs associated with the project.
“Any costs arising above this contingency would be an additional cost to the council,” according to a report.
Speaking at a meeting of the authority’s executive on Tuesday (15 July), Cllr Mark Crane, the executive member for open to business, said: “One of the positive things that we’ve inherited from Scarborough Borough Council are our harbours, and we’ve also inherited some fairly significant bills from them.
“Frankly, if we don’t do this, then we face a problem with the harbour and how long it would withstand the pressure of the water.
“But if we do this improvement to the harbour at the cost of £1.8m – I recognise that it’s a very significant cost – we believe the sheeting under the harbour will last for another 10 years.”
He added: “I want to remind the residents of Scarborough how much we support them and how much money we’ve spent in that area recently, to the benefit of the people who live there and who visit the town and the pier.”
The costs proposed by the contractor have been competitively tendered as “sub-contract packages” and have been subject to an independent audit by a chartered quantity surveyor.
Cllr Liz Colling, the chair of the Scarborough and Whitby Area Committee said it was a “much needed” project and noted that the funding was “really welcomed”.
As Scarborough Harbour has “limited ability to generate income, there are insufficient immediate reserves to cover these costs, so the ringfenced harbour account will therefore effectively be overdrawn,” a report presented to the executive notes.
“The project will be technically underwritten by NYC’s other reserves and the borrowing from the council’s reserves will be repayable to the council when there are sufficient funds available within the Scarborough Harbour account,” it said.
The report added: “Based on the current forecast of the ringfenced account, the repayment is unlikely to happen for some time and so it is not proposed that interest is charged on the overdrawn balance.
“The council reserves the right to revisit this interest assumption should there be a significant increase in harbour revenues in the future.”
After completion of the works, the ongoing maintenance costs will be funded from the existing harbour maintenance budget “as and when this is required”.