Key events in Gloucester brought back in-house

Marketing Gloucester will no longer run key events such as Tall Ships and Gloucester Carnival.

Instead they will be run by Gloucester City Council  after senior councillors voted to bring them back in-house this week.

The authority’s cabinet backed proposals to take the commissioning of events and the budget in its own hands.

The decision follows the city council’s bailout of £240,000 to Marketing Gloucester to help it continue until the end of the financial year after “cash flow problems”.

After the council meeting on Tuesday, councillor Jeremy Hilton called the bailout “a disaster”.

During the meeting councillor Steve Morgan confirmed interviews for an interim replacement for Marketing Gloucester’s chief executive Jason Smith and confirmed Mr Smith has been “dismissed” from his role.

Asked on the future of events in the city after the meeting, Mr Morgan said “a lot of the events will be retained” and “some will have more money.”

He also hinted at new events for Gloucester and insisted the change would be ‘positive.’

Mr Morgan also said he could not give any “cast iron guarantees” to Marketing Gloucester’s employees of jobs following the decision tonight, adding “we’ve learnt lessons, we’re moving ahead.”

A former employee of Marketing Gloucester, Debbie Hill, said after the meeting: “It’s only the tip of the iceberg at the moment and I am sure there is far more information to come out.”

A scrutiny meeting just before Christmas discussed two independent reports into the function of Marketing Gloucester, which said the company is “financially volatile” and “too focused on events”.

The independent consultants behind the reports,  Grant Thornton and Melanie Sensicle and Jason Freezer, advised the city council to take these aspects – budgeting and events management – back in-house, meaning the council would be in charge of organising occasions such as Tall Ships and the annual carnival.

Leader of the Liberal Democrats on the city council Jeremy Hilton (Kingsholm and Wotton) said after the meeting: “We have always supported a vehicle used to promote the city of Gloucester worldwide and to get people to come to us.

“Our concern is of course is this arms-length organisation which was set up and 100 per cent owned by Gloucester City Council, and chaired by the former leader of the council for eight years, has such poor control mechanisms and financial mechanisms.

“We have got to the situation where the council has had to bail it out to the tune of £240,000. It really is a disaster.”

Councillor Steve Morgan (C, Grange), cabinet member for culture and leisure, said after the meeting: “We are putting money aside. Events are going to change. We’ve got some exciting new ones we’re looking at. A lot of the existing events that are popular and in are important to the city, they are being retained. Some of those will have extra put into them. So it’s change but in a positive way.”

“I saw the [Marketing Gloucester] employees today and I had to say that I can’t give any cast-iron guarantees of anything at this moment in time.

And they understood that, because the employer is the Marketing Gloucester board, not the city council.

“We are very mindful of what they’ve done, they’ve worked really hard. But change is going to happen, they understand that. We will now be able to move forward a little bit quicker having got this resolution tonight and these recommendations have been passed by cabinet.

“We have moved as quickly as we can because we know it is unsettling for staff, and you have to feel for them.

“It is public knowledge there are things that, in hindsight, would not have been allowed to happen the way they did.

“Various things needed to be improved. But we’ve recognised that now, we’ve got to the point of looking to put them on a much more sustainable footing. We’ve learnt lessons, we’re moving ahead.”

The city council’s takeover of events in Gloucester comes a month after it was revealed it had only recently realised it had owned a company, through Marketing Gloucester, for two years.

The former deputy leader of the authority councillor Jennie Watkins (C, Kingsway) told a scrutiny committee in December that Marketing Gloucester has owned another company which was unknown to board members.

That subsidiary company was  UK Digital Retail Innovation Centre (UK DRIC), based in Eastgate Shopping Centre, and the city council only discovered it has owned it for the past two years in October.