SHOCKING INCREASES IN RENT PROPOSED

BCP have come up with a five-year plan to 'harmonise' beach huts across the three towns and hut users are the losers

You are probably aware that the BCP's original plan to sell the next 20 years worth of Beach Hut Licences to a company (a Special Purposes Vehicle, ‘SPV’) was dropped after intervention from Central Government. The Central Government Minister said that the plan did not follow the ’spirit’ of the Flexible Use of Capital Reserves (FUCR) legislation and the Government wanted to stop Councils from indulging in ‘dodgy dealing’.

Owing to the failure to raise £54M through selling this future income in order to raise capital to fund the Council’s Transformation Project and ‘Big Plan’, there has been a move within Council to increase their revenues from the Beach Huts by what they have termed “In-house Commercialisation” and “Harmonisation”.

The Council Officer responsible for drafting this new plan (Head of Seafront - Anthony Rogers) and the ‘Portfolio Holder’ (Councillor Mark Andersen) contacted the Chairs of the four Beach Hut Associations (Mudeford, Poole and Friar’s Cliff) to set up a series of three online meetings to present their draft plan, take feedback and then answer the points that the Association Chairs had made. These three meetings were held on 5/10, 12/10 and 19/10 2022.

We were supplied with a draft report to Council Cabinet, a research Briefing Paper into the affluence of Beach Hut owners/tenants and spreadsheets showing the proposed increases in rents across all Beach Huts over the next five years.

To say that the Chairs of the Beach Hut Associations were shocked at what was being presented is an understatement. Although we have copies of these papers, as they are still only drafts, we cannot distribute them to you, at the moment. We will try and make them available as and when they get closer to being in the public domain. We have been fortunate to share the expertise of the other association chairs to give you our current understanding of the key elements in the Council’s draft plan.

We need to increase our membership and make our voices to oppose this planned exploitation of beach hut users. Please click above to join us and make our voices louder!