Revealed: cost of Council’s purchase of Leonard Street gallery
The Leonard Street property bought by Hackney Council. Photograph: Josh Loeb
The mystery surrounding the cost of a Leonard Street gallery bought by the Town Hall has been solved.
The Hackney Citizen can reveal the council spent £4,368,000.00 on buying the freehold at 89-90 Leonard Street.
Until now, the cost has been concealed from the public despite the purchase being made with millions of pounds of taxpayer’s money.
A Freedom of Information (FoI) request from the Hackney Citizen asking what the purchase price was but the council refused to release this information would be “damaging”.
In the response to the FOI, Hackney Council’s Corporate Director of Finance and Resources Ian Williams said: “The council believes that the price information should be withheld to protect a legitimate economic interest underlying commercial confidentiality.
The figure was requested during the public inspection of Hackney Council’s accounts.
Employment space
The council says the gallery will be used for “low-cost employment space”.
A spokesperson for Hackney Council said: “The acquisition of this building will help us protect jobs and stimulate economic growth in the area by providing low-cost employment space for start-up companies which cannot afford luxury offices.
“The previous owner had secured planning consent for residential use on the top floor but we want that to be used as employment space instead.
“This is a safe investment as the space is likely to be in demand for many years to come.”
I wonder how much taxpayer money is spent on council officers chasing up pointless FOIs? The council bought a building; not a big deal, literally.
But here’s an idea – why don’t you send in an FOI to find out how much it costs to answer an FOI? Then we can all know how much we’re indirectly paying for the Hackney Citizen to generate copy.
@PFindlay I think if you read the article it explains that the council in fact refused to answer the FoI question, even though they are supposed to be transparent about how much of our money they are spending on what – which is quite an important thing, wouldn’t you say? If the council wasn’t so unnecessarily secretive about stuff like this, “pointless” FoIs wouldn’t be needed. Revealing how much public money was spent on one thing or another is pretty basic stuff that should automatically be public. Otherwise we might as well all give up.
Well done Hackney Council – a great investment which actually builds up the capital assets of the borough and generates a space that can be put to a useful social purpose. If only they did more of it.
I don’t suppose the fact that Hackney already had vacant office space, fit for the purpose, empty for years and a couple of hundred yards down the road occurred to anybody at the council. No. Instead, they splashed out on buying another building and then finally leased the offices that they already owned to a private company that they are now going to subsidise to do precisely what they are intending to do with the new building ie. provide low cost office space. It defies logic.
Is that the offices under Shoreditch House?Hackney council are so intent on buying property that they forget to keep an eye on what they already have.They have lost another lot of land to squatters in Hoxton because no one could be bothered to collect rents.