‘Filton is the no-brainer location for Bristol Arena’

The plagued arena at Temple Meads has been a white elephant from the outset. Its inception was clouded in suspicion and no other potential sites were even considered. Located next door to the train station, the proposed arena offers no parking and will create big problems elsewhere in the city for those travelling in by car.

Conversely, Brabazon Hangar in Filton is close to the motorways and offers excellent parking. It is very easy to get to, allowing many locals to either walk, cycle, or take public transport to the venue.

A brand new train station will service the area too – 11 minutes to the CBD. This station is due to be built regardless of a stadium, and money for this is already allocated.

In stark contrast to the Temple Meads location, visitors from outside the city can easily travel from their towns, mitigating inner-city pollution and congestion.

Malaysian company YTL have plans to build an arena within the Brabazon hangar

Bus routes from all over the city already go to Filton. Sadly, other transport around the city allowing access to the centre in the form of the new metro bus lines have proved to be less than adequate to support the town, therefore Filton will also enable quicker access to the arena site for more people from more places.

A staggering £53m of West of England Local Enterprise Partnership (LEP) funding funding could go to the City Council for the development of a small (12,000-capacity) Bristol Arena at Bristol Temple Quarter Enterprise Zone.

The money, which has not actually been committed by the LEP would be repaid through the retention of business rates over 25 years.

YTL have purchased the Filton Airfield, and a station will be built there to support the expansion of the successful (out of town) Cribbs Causeway, regardless of the YTL investment. YTL will be building good quality housing and business premises on the historic airfield site.

At Filton, the LEP money, plus an additional £47m committed by YTL developers, will go on improving Bristol transport. That’s £100m pounds spent on improving transport across the city.

If that isn’t enough, Bristol gets a modern, free 16,000-seat arena built and paid for by YTL.

YTL have an excellent worldwide reputation for delivering projects on time, in full and to budget. The LEP money – which they already agree would NOT be wisely invested in the arena – would be so much better spent further improving transport throughout the whole city for the benefit of everyone.

The Buckingham Group claim they are ready to start work on Temple Meads arena for a fixed price of £110 million with an 18 per cent margin above. They desperately want to win this contract.

I spoke to them at length about this and they have a caveat which suggests it might still cost £156m, even further outside the budget set by the city council.

According to the comprehensive KPMG Vaue for Money report, the arena at Temple Meads will actually cost £156.3m and will take 25 years to make any profit whatsoever. The debt will be higher than predicted and the Gross Added value much worse than that of a conference centre and much needed housing on the site.

So, the Temple Meads arena will cost Bristol City Council a huge amount of taxpayers’ money that would otherwise be used to fund much needed local services. Bristol’s terrible transport infrastructure is notorious, as is the congestion in Bristol city centre. Concert goers are likely to bypass Bristol and head for Cardiff’s soon-to-be built new arena (more about that later).

Taxpayers’ money has already unwisely been spent on building a bridge and buying land at Temple Meads – without, I should add, any documented consideration report.

However, this £20m shortfall is easily salvaged. Temple Meads would perfectly suit a conference facility and very-much-needed housing. The KPMG Value for Money report demonstrated how very much more profitable this conference and housing would be for the city.

Most importantly, the whole point of the arena is to attract music lovers. The 12,000-capacity Temple Meads arena simply isn’t big enough to attract big names.

I have been in discussion with the vendors of the existing Cardiff Arena; this inner city 7,500-capacity arena is not attracting big names. Cardiff is now planning an out-of-town arena, because here they could increase capacity to 15,500. This would be deadly competition for Temple Meads’ 12,000-seater.

In all likelihood, should the arena be built in Temple Meads then YTL will respond by making a 16,000-seater ‘concert centre of excellence’ in the hangar in Filton anyway. Thus creating even more revenue-stealing competition for the white elephant arena in Temple Meads.

Other arenas built in the centre of cities don’t have lots of car parking and create major disruption. The successful stadiums (as with successful shopping centres) are almost always built out of town. Even London’s 02 Arena is not centrally located.

An arena project successfully and economically built would become an iconic emblem that will enhance the city’s reputation.

The sheer cost of building an arena in Temple Meads, when conferencing is more profitable and housing more appropriate, would immediately bode badly for Bristol, making our city a laughing stock and poorly affecting economic growth.

Meanwhile, the Brabazon 16,000-capacity arena in Filton would accelerate economic development in Bristol. Filton and the abundance of shops and hotels in the area will also benefit from the cash injection into the area -much needed in light of Rolls Royce announcing they are cutting 4,000 jobs and Airbus potentially moving to Europe.

The Value for Money report and basic logic clearly demonstrate that Filton is the no-brainer place to build the arena; not just for the increased capacity that a 16,000-seat arena would bring, not just for the greater benefits of a conference centre at Temple Meads, not just for the saving to the taxpayer, but also to utilise the excellent made-for-it hangar and its capacity, history and excellent geographical location.

Daniel Ramage has had a career in media and marketing spanning 27 years. He has knowledge in the historic deciding factors for the location of venues, and for a decade he was responsible for driving exhibition and event traffic from the UK’s largest inner city venues to London’s Excel.