Opinion: A worrying pattern of plans not turning out as first announced by our City Council

Amongst the reasons given were the council no longer felt that they were getting market value for the property, the adjacent Heltwate School needed the building for much-needed expansion, to cope with demand and that another operator was submitting plans for a state-of-the-art hydrotherapy pool elsewhere in the city.

No attempt was made to reopen negotiations to secure a more acceptable price for the property and the alternative operator promised a potential opening in the Spring of this year.

Now 18 months on we are seeing that the alternative operator has not only failed to build a new facility but has withdrawn his plans to do so in June of this year. The site itself has been abandoned and to date, no plans have been submitted to develop this building for the much-needed expansion of the school.

I suspect the Conservative administration is just hoping that people will just give up and move on. However the tenacity and determination of the St George's Hydrotherapy Users Group is unlikely to fade away and they have woefully been misjudged by the administration.

Moving on to another matter, we have seen the plans for the Vine project for the former TKMaxx building abandoned and the building put up for sale to a private developer, I hope this doesn’t show the way forward for the redevelopment of the Station Quarter, much publicised by the Peterborough MP and his large cheque (although funding came via the combined authority and not the party with their logo on the fake cheque)

I note also that Cambridge now has plans for a third rail station for their city, plans for our second city station in Hampton are now just a faint memory, yet another hollow promise that went nowhere after it had persuaded London commuters to move to Hampton.

I do hope that the developer for the Hilton Hotel scheme is able to repay the existing Council provided loan when they secure private funding soon, as it is beginning to echo the loan arrangement that the council had with Empower that ended with the council having to take the operation in-house before it collapsed. The thought of the council becoming a hotel operator fills me with dread, although the idea of our council leader in a bellhop uniform taking guests’ luggage to their rooms does have some comedic value.