Cheaper cladding among 'tweaks' needed to deliver Peterborough's newest university building with available funds

“Superficial changes” to Peterborough’s newest university building may be necessary to deliver the project, Peterborough City Council (PCC) councillors have been told.

Tweaks to ARU Peterborough’s ‘Living Lab’, a science centre and teaching building planned on the former Regional Pool car park, will include slight alterations to its interior and cheaper cladding, council executive Adrian Chapman told members at a shareholder cabinet committee meeting this week.

He added that “every item of spend” has been reviewed as shareholders PCC, Anglia Ruskin University and the Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Combined Authority (CPCA), contends with the project's £3.9m funding gap.

The committee agreed that the council should provide an extra £1.3m in the form of investing in 1,300,000 ordinary shares (to the value of £1 per share) in the Peterborough HE Property Company Ltd, giving them a 37.6 per cent holding in the company delivering the university project.

Both Anglia Ruskin and the CPCA have also agreed to help bridge the funding gap in principle.

The full £1.3m may not be necessary, though, Mr Chapman told the committee, as existing funding will be used up first as well as any additional external funding and underspend from other parts of the project, although at present he says he can't see the investment needed from PCC falling below £1m.

Before agreeing to his recommendations, councillors quizzed Mr Chapman as to how different the Living Lab, heralded as an “interactive science centre and education space”, will look from original plans and indeed the existent ARU Peterborough buildings which have already been established in the city centre – at which its first ever cohort of students have been studying since September 2022.

He told them that the tweaks won’t “really significantly [affect] the quality of the build and the feel we’re trying to create in Peterborough, which is one of a campus of buildings that gel together”, although there “may be some superficial changes” in order to keep the additional spend needed at £3.9m or below.

“Cladding is the largest factor in that,” he continued, “and there are lots of other, smaller, tweaks here and there to the interior finish and that kind of thing.

“The cladding will be a different material; it will look the same and have the same feel but it’s a cheaper product. There may be a longer-term issue around its maintenance, but we just need to make sure we’ve got really strong contracts in place to look after it.”

The cladding – which is essentially a material applied to buildings' exteriors to improve their heat retention and weather resistance – will still be “above industry standard” and “exceptionally safe”, he added, after committee chair Cllr Steve Allen (Conservatives, Eye, Thorney and Newborough) pointed out that there has been particular interest in it since 2017’s Grenfell Tower fire in which the building’s cladding is believed to have contributed to the scale of the tragedy.

The Living Lab has already been granted £20m from the Government’s Levelling Up fund, with one of its requirements being completion by 2024.

The build could have been delayed until 2025 without the pledge of additional funds, a council report says, as this is how long a complete re-design may have taken, jeopardising existing funds.

The gap came about, Mr Chapman said, because of inflationary pressures and supply chain issues.

The council report adds that the project's main contractor "flagged significant cost pressure relating to specific packages of work, namely cladding, external, and mechanical and electrical works".

The recommendation to provide an extra £1.3m in shares will next go to PCC’s cabinet, after which it’s expected to be fully approved.