‘Council wants to point finger, not negotiate’

THE cricket club said it was not responsible for looking after the pavilion.

Chairman Neil Boddington said: “It is the parish council’s building, we are only leasing it. We pay £5,000 a year to rent the property. We have no responsibility to do anything else; if we did something and it went wrong, we would be liable.

“The council think we are abusing it because we get it for good value but we pay contributions to gas and electricity, we buy the bar licence and run the bar and we have charitable status, which saves the council 90 per cent of their rates per annum, which works out to about £4,000. All these things are conveniently forgotten when you’re playing politics.

“They are clearly trying to put additional costs on the club. We’ll have to find an extra £5,000 to £7,000 to accommodate the fact that they don’t want to pay. If we have to double the fees, we will lose most of our members.

“We get very little back from the parish council, although they would say differently. We have 300 members and get about £2 a head, while the youth club, which has 15 members, gets £3,000 a year as a contribution from the council toi running costs, making it about £200 per head. We are trying to work through this and sort out the checks and balances while they are being ham-fisted with their approach to negotiations. They have a duty to provide us with some information so we can make some informed decisions.

“I was out on business and could not come to the council meeting, which they gave us three days’ notice for. We all work full time. We are not retired like most of the parish council members who have all day to work on these things.

“We have had no meetings to talk it all through. We would like to own the building but the council don’t seem to have done much about it. For example, we want the boilers changed. We are happy to talk but need a level playing field when we start to own the pavilion. We don’t want to inherit a pavilion that is going to blow up in the next two years because it is failing, which it effectively is.

“The councillors’ negotiations are a little bit uneducated. They want to point the finger, not negotiate in a professional fashion. We are somewhat uninterested because we are not being given the information we would like.”