Cinema Opportunity Lost
Lights, camera, inaction! Grab your popcorn for a gripping tale of local politics and reel injustice (based on a true story) about the cinema that might have been.
I am currently chair of the Beehive Working Group on Honiton Town Council, a rather thankless job given how unpopular the Beehive is with many Honiton residents.
The Beehive, which is owned by Honiton Town Council, is currently leased to Honiton Community Complex (HCC) a company created in 2013 specificially to operate the building.
As the current lease on the Honiton Beehive expires in September 2025, our job has included trying to find a new leaseholder for the building whilst also working on a contingency plan, known as Plan B, to avoid the building standing empty if we were unable to find a suitable tenant.
The working group took a proactive approach so as well as placing the property with a commercial estate agent, regular members of the working group contacted dozens of organisations who might be interested.
By pure luck, a suggestion from another councillor struck gold, and in late 2023 I started informal discussions with an independent cinema operator who expressed an interest in the Beehive lease but wished to remain anonymous during the preliminary stages.
This company conducted a site survey and said that they might be interested in operating the venue as a cinema with some limited community access the details of which could be worked out during formal negotiations.
Legal Advice Ignored
After the site survey, in a twist straight out of a Hollywood blockbuster, the formal lease tender process took an unexpected direction.
Despite being informed that a second company had visited the Beehive and shown interest, councillors at the June 2024 full council meeting rushed to proceed with a closed tender for the Beehive lease.
This decision effectively ensured that the other company would have no opportunity to submit a formal bid. It also disregarded clear legal advice from the council’s solicitors, who had specifically recommended an open tender process.
The minutes of the meeting show that I said that “the council has a duty to provide value for money” and that I “recommended following legal advice in favour of an open tender.”
I formally proposed the open tender which was seconded by Cllr Tony McCollum.
However, the majority voted to invite only Honiton Community Complex to tender, effectively excluding the potential second bidder.
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Open Tender or Closed Tender?
In order to demonstrate value for money (taxpayers’ money don’t forget) a contract of this size which may end up costing well over £3m over the 30 year life of the proposed lease should have gone to an open tender.
If the independent cinema operator had been allowed to tender then we would have been able to make an informed decision between two radically different potential lessees each offering a different solution.
Given their extensive track record, I personally believe that the independent cinema operator would have been able to run the Beehive as a cinema at little or no cost to the Honiton taxpayer and might have been the better financial option.
Sadly, we shall never know.
Independent Thinking
I may be wrong but I suspect that the idea of a multi screen cinema would have been the most exciting thing to happen in Honiton since the opening of Dominos Pizza.
If elected to DCC, this is the kind of independent thinking I will bring to the job on behalf of the people of Feniton & Honiton.
But I won’t cut corners and ignore legal advice.