Political Football
Council leader challenged over blocking of relocation plan
The owners of Hastings United Football Club are pursuing a collision course with the minority Labour administration of Hastings Borough Council (HBC), led by Cllr Paul Barnett, over the future of its Pilot Field ground.
In March this year Cllr Barnett, then newly appointed leader of a majority Labour council, put a block on the club’s proposed relocation from Pilot Field to Tilekiln playing fields in Hollington. HBC owns the freehold of both sites, and although the idea of the move had been floated publicly since October 2017 amidst general expressions of enthusiasm within council ranks, and formal planning applications were lodged by the club in September 2020, terms of sale and purchase were never finalised.
One of Cllr Barnett’s first actions as leader was to pull the plug. “The world has moved on since we started talking about this four years ago”, he announced in March, “and our priority now has to be to protect and invest in our green spaces, and wherever possible re-use existing buildings rather than build new ones. This means ensuring that Tilekiln, a well-used and popular community facility, is preserved for the people of Hollington.”
CREDIT: Scott White
The club’s owners, Peter Sherlock and Darren Burney, showed no immediate public reaction then. Their CEO Billy Woods issued a statement merely expressing sadness at “the “change in mindset” from the council and disappointment at the club “wasting the last two years of planning at considerable cost”. He indicated that they would undertake further discussion with the council.
Eastbourne option
But such further discussion appears to have reached an impasse. About two weeks ago, Sherlock issued a public threat that unless HBC would allow and facilitate the move to Tilekiln, the club would pursue an alternative arrangement with Eastbourne Borough FC for its first team to share the latter’s ground at Langley for the foreseeable future.
This threat was followed up by a meeting at the club’s public bar at Pilot Field last Thursday, originally convened by the Hastings United Independent Supporters Club (HUISC) as a forum for fans to meet with the management and playing staff – but effectively hijacked by Sherlock and Burney to air the relocation issue in public.
In a boisterous debate, chaired by Chris Laverick of HUISC but fronted by the owners and attended by around 100 supporters including several borough councillors, the proposal to ground-share at Eastbourne came in for almost universal condemnation. Several speakers warned that English football history is littered with examples of clubs that, exiled from their traditional grounds, struggled for years or decades to recover. There was also strongly vented suspicion that Sherlock and Burney were using their position as owners and directors to pursue their own agenda to force the relocation issue. Both men have a professional background in property develop-ment, and would stand to gain personally from the proposed plans to redevelop Pilot Field as a housing estate while building a new stadium and concomitant facilities at Tilekiln.
Maintenance issues
But Burney and Sherlock were both adamant that remaining at Pilot Field is not a sustainable option because of the high maintenance costs associated with the dilapidated main stand and the risks to public safety of its potential collapse. They claimed that the most recent structural report which they had commissioned advised that up to £120,000 expenditure would be needed within the next 12 to 18 months. This was on top of large annual maintenance costs over the eight previous years of their ownership. If the stand were to be condemned, the first team would be barred from competing in the Isthmian League, which requires grounds to offer at least 250 spectator seats, and thus automatically relegated two tiers.
They contended, furthermore, that the Pilot Field ground and its facilities were in any event hopelessly over-stretched to sustain the number of mens, womens, youth and junior teams which the club now runs – most were already having to play on far-flung pitches outside the borough. Sherlock claimed that the lives of 500-plus children and youths would be enhanced by the offer of new facilities at Tilekiln, including two 3G pitches for community use.
The audience remained divided. One vociferous contributor continued to accuse the owners of putting their personal interest first. “You’re writing off this ground,” he argued, “because, if you didn’t, you wouldn’t persuade the council to give you permission to move.” Others demanded that the owners release for public view the structural reports upon which they were basing their arguments.
However, the general ground-swell of opinion at the meeting, measured in numbers of speakers and hand-clapping of their contributions, suggested a clear majority in favour of the Tilekiln move, and near-universal disapproval of HBC’s failure to offer support in any direction.
Councillor interventions
Cllr Andy Batsford, lead cabinet member for leisure, culture and health, was in the audience and spoke in defence of the Labour administration’s policy. Pilot Field remained, he argued, the best location for the town’s premier club, and Cllr Barnett had put forward a potentially viable option of refurbishing it by recourse to a ‘levelling up’ bid. The council’s overriding priority was to retain green spaces in the borough.
Several members of the audience interjected that the HBC’s current development of housing on the Harrow Lane playing fields gave the lie to this argument. Then two councillors present from other parties also spoke, casting doubt on whether the council leader had majority backing for the policy blocking relocation. Conservative Mike Edwards pointed out that the issue had never been debated either in cabinet or in a full council meeting. Cllr Barnett had made his decision in March when backed by a Labour party majority in the council – but, since May, the party no longer commanded a majority and needed the support of other parties. Green party councillor Claire Carr concurred.
The debate concluded without any summation of arguments for or against the owners’ proposals, nor any kind of vote of club supporters as to how they think that it should proceed. But might Conservative and Green councillors now join forces to shift the debate to the council chamber? Watch this space.
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Is there no save the pilot field groups