Debt That Never Was (4 March 1977)

I hope everybody has taken notice of Mr Ron Staniford’s recent letter to the Gazette regarding the true nature and extent of the debt on Bletchley’s Leisure Centre.  And I call it “Bletchley’s Leisure Centre”, not “The Bletchley Leisure Centre”, quite deliberately, for reasons which I hope to make clear.

The story does not go back merely to the beginning of work on the centre. It goes back almost to the beginning of Bletchley’s own post-war development – to 1949 or 1950.  At that time, the town of 10,000 people did not definitely know it would be accepted for any kind of special development at all, though the possibility was very much in the air.

Bletchley was getting on well with its own local housing programme and was also hoping that manufacturers who had come to the town before and during the war would stay and that others would follow so as to provide a greater variety of jobs for the increasing population.

In those days, the Gazette was published by Bletchley Printers Ltd from their general printing works in the Central Gardens approach road.  Head of the firm was Mr Harold Price and he was also Chairman of the district council in 1949, 1950 and 1951.  One day he came into the tiny editorial room and asked my opinion of a suggestion that the council itself should develop an industrial estate.  Private developers were already nosing around, but under this suggestion the income would stay where it belonged, in Bletchley, for the benefit of Bletchley ratepayers.

This was almost a revolutionary idea at the time.  But there was a snag.  Owing to costly new water and sewerage schemes coming on top of the housing programme, Bletchley was so short of funds that only a few months earlier Mr Price, then chairman of the finance committee, had said in the council that he “could not see any easement of the council’s financial stringency for at least 20 years.”

On the other hand, land especially was bound to increase in value over the years and I knew of two or three factory estates elsewhere, which had been built by private developers not long before the war and which, to all appearances, had been successful.  So I said I thought it would be a good thing – if it could be afforded.

I suppose Mr Price canvassed many other opinions as well.  Indeed, it might not have been just his own brainwave.  But that was the first I heard of an idea that very quickly became council policy and which, more than any other, led to the creation of the Leisure Centre and other amenities 20 years later.

With the operation of the Town Development Act 1952, the need for jobs became imperative, and Bletchley, in contrast with some other places, was able to offer both land and factories – many of them built to suit each manufacturer’s particular purpose.  Once begun, the thing snowballed.

But there were growing pains. In particular, whenever the question of more amenities was raised, it had to be shelved in favour of the ever- pressing need for more houses and more jobs.

Some amenities were provided, but for the most part Mr Staniford, as almost perpetual chairman of the amenities committee, must have felt that like he was banging his head on a brick wall.

However, the town began to benefit greatly from the factory estates.  Indeed, there were several years when factory rents provided the only plus factor that enabled the rates to be kept at a reasonable level.  Meanwhile, some manufacturers who had been very successful since coming to Bletchley, began asking about the possibility of becoming owner-occupiers.

The advent of the new city provided another spur to development but when, only a year or two later, new and wider local district boundaries were also mooted, Bletchley people began asking what they were getting in the way of amenities for their long years of sacrifice.  Why should those precious factory rents, which had been founded on Bletchley money, possibly go towards subsidising other developments elsewhere?

The old council responded by selling off industrial land and factories and dedicating the proceeds to the cash-down provision of a series of amenities long needed in the town itself, including most of the Leisure Centre.

Mr Staniford’s letter describes how that bonanza of nearly £2million has been diverted to a general internal fund instead, with the result that a largely paid-for Leisure Centre is shown as owing a tremendous debt to the borough as a whole, when the opposite is the truth.

I have never had a head for the higher summits of financial wizardry, so it might be that there is a satisfactory explanation somewhere along the line.  But as a Bletchley ratepayer for the past 11 years, I am left with the uneasy feeling that having as good as paid for something once, I am now being called upon to pay for it all over again.  At any rate, on this particular capital account, I utterly reject the notion that Bletchley owes much more than a brass farthing to anybody else in the borough or outside it.