Cost of not building student halls in Hereford revealed

Herefordshire Council spent over quarter of a million pounds to determine that building new student accommodation for Hereford, including at the city football stadium, wouldn’t make financial sense.

The council last year commissioned Cheshire-based regeneration firm Cityheart to carry out a feasibility study into revived plans for student flats in the redeveloped Blackfriars Street end of Hereford FC’s ground, which it owns, as well as in the city’s Venns Lane.

The council “has spent £253,000 on work undertaken to date”, it has now said in an update.

But this sum is dwarfed by the “unrecoverable investment” of over £18 million which the proposals would cost the council had they gone ahead, even if the 400 proposed student units had achieved a 90 per cent occupancy rate, it now says.

Worse, “the study also concluded there is no current demonstrable demand for student accommodation at this scale in the city at this time”, while rising building costs and interest rates have since further widened the project’s “viability gap”, the council added.

It is not clear where this leaves the Blackfriars End site in particular, where the old football stand was levelled last year, having long been unusable due to safety concerns.

The council suggested the site “could be made available to the higher education providers to develop, with the council taking the capital from the sale of the land”.

But it judged that these bodies do not “have the resources, the capital or the capability to do this”.

The council was asked what it therefore now plans to do with the site.

A representative of Hereford FC said it is continuing to talk to the council over the options for this part of its ground.

The club has finished installing new LED floodlights on smaller pylons at the ground ahead of next season – though the original lighting towers, a city landmark, remain in place “for now”, they added.

Herefordshire Council meanwhile plans to start redeveloping the Merton Meadow area immediately north of the ground later this year.