Fears for flagship shopping centre
CONCERNS have been raised over Rochdale’s flagship Riverside shopping centre after it emerged the council is liable for the rent and business rates on empty units.
The town centre retail and leisure destination opened in the summer, but has been badly hit by the pandemic.
The launch of its Reel Cinema has been twice delayed, while clothes shops and food outlets have been seriously affected by Covid restrictions. Rochdale council is the ‘head tenant’ of the £80m scheme, and has an option to buy the centre for £1 at the end of the 35-year lease. It pays an annual rent to investor M&G Ltd, offset by tenants’ rent payments.
But where units are left empty, the authority has to pick up the bill. It must also cover business rates. Developer Genr8 has guaranteed the estimated rental income for the first three years of the scheme - £2.3m in in 2020/21 - while the government is providing councils with business rates top-up grants.
Over the next 10 years, the council will set aside annual funds to ‘prudently mitigate against’ the pandemic’s impact on the retail sector. Council leader Allen Brett told this week’s budget-setting meeting the authority would be ‘providing £750,000 in recurrent funding’ to support the scheme. This measure was raised later in the meeting by Lib Dem group leader Andy Kelly.
“We are already saving three-quarters of a million pounds in case things go wrong,” he said. “In light of the pandemic in light of the fact high street shopping is not looking good, I have got to say we are going to be using more and more of our financial savings - if not our reserves - just to keep the payments up on our shopping centre.”