Council set to green light £1m towards Football Museum for Wales in Wrexham Museum

Councillors will formally approve an allocation of council funds to the Wrexham Museum redevelopment for the Football Museum for Wales project.

Last week the same project received a £40k boost from the National Lottery Heritage Fund.

The detail is in one of several reports before councillors at tomorrow’s later than normal Executive Board (2pm). The Capital Programme Outturn and update report gives the normal run down of the position of Wrexham Council’s capital programme position as at the end of the first quarter of this financial year.

The headline figure of £1m to the Football Museum is explained, “The Authority received notification from Welsh Government on 24 March 2022 that it had been awarded £1m Regional Economic Framework Priorities grant.

“The grant was used in 2021/22 for Highways Infrastructure works. It is proposed to allocate the General Capital funding displaced by the grant to the Wrexham Museum Redevelopment for the Football Museum for Wales in the future programme.”

Details on the initial funding source, the mechanism, and how substantial the funding is compared to the overall scheme pricetag will likely emerge during the meeting – and possibly even an update on the overall funding of the project, including any secured committed funds from Welsh Government.

As we reported in May, the Newbridge repair funding is also referenced in the wider report, “An award of funding in relation to the Resilient Roads Fund was received from Welsh Government on 6th April 2022 notifying the Authority that its application had been successful. The funding of £2,805k is to be used for ground investigation, detailed design and construction of remedial works for the B5605 Newbridge Wrexham.”

The report also details £7.7m of spending that will be ‘rescheduled’ to 2022/23, including:

• Town Centre Improvement Projects (-£350k). Projects to be identified and undertaken in 2022/23.
• School IT Equipment (-£90k). Following an announcement from Welsh Government in July 2019 of additional funding being made available to upgrade Education Technology (EdTech) equipment in schools this allocation was not required in 2021/22 but will be carried forward for use in future years.
• School Capital Maintenance (-£727k). These projects were not able to be completed in 21/22 due to the volume of works undertaken in this year. Works have been procured and programmed in for this financial year.
• Crematorium Refurbishment Scheme (-£128k). Delivery of the first Cremator originally included for early 2022 will now be delivered in August with the second Cremator soon after.
• Flood Recovery Costs (£-343k). Due to delays in procuring suitable contractors to deliver some of the Flood Recovery projects some of the expenditure to complete the projects will now take place in the 2022/23 financial year.
• Electric Refuse Vehicle (-£205k). The vehicle has been received in April 2022.

Procurement delays also affected the Local Transport Fund (-£186k), “Due to procurement delays in securing an appropriate contractor the grant could not be fully utilised in 2021/22. A request to carry over this grant into 2022/23 has been made to Welsh Government” and  Active Travel Fund (-£431k), again delays “…and the inability to find a contractor with capacity to complete the work by the required grant deadline”.

Extra money has come from the Football Association Wales for 3G Football Club Hubs. We have previously reported on the £200k award to Wrexham Council for the creation of two school 3G football pitches (Ysgol Rhosnesni and Ysgol y Grango) subject to match funding, the report tomorrow notes, “Following an increase in costs the FAW have awarded a further £200k towards the schemes, with the total costs now anticipated to be £600k.”

Possible good news for school meal provision, with £1m capital funding allocated by Welsh Government earlier this year to support the rollout of Universal Primary Free School, the council say, “Given the short notice of the grant award the full amount was allocated to other Education capital expenditure in 2021/22 in line with the grant conditions. The funding displaced by the grant has been carried forward into 2022/23 for purchasing and upgrading equipment, upgrading existing dining/kitchen facilities and work to increase the capacity of school meal infrastructure.”

The full report, and others, will be heard by the Executive Board tomorrow afternoon with the opportunity for any councillor to ask questions on it.

As previously noted, the public can’t asked questions on the report as the deadline to ask them was before the report was made public.

Last week councillors managed to overcome such time based barriers, by deeming a report ‘a matter of urgency’ to ensure it legally could be taken by a committee. It is unclear if the public (or members!) could be given such leeway if they wanted to circumvent the question deadline.