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Maltings build cost increases by £5m

20th September, 2026

A Borderlands document prepared for a board meeting in September shows how costs have risen, among other illuminating facts. For details, visit the site below and click on the document for 23 September (Borderlands Partnership Board Papers 23.09.2026.pdf):

www.borderlandsgrowth.com/the-deal/downloads

We’ll highlight some of the main points below.

Schedule slippage

Earlier in the year, an opening date of 2028 was given: see for example this BBC article in which Glen Sanderson also tells blatant lies about listening “very, very carefully” to aesthetic concerns and making “those changes”. The Maltings is now not due to open until April 2029, although it’s hard to believe that in this difficult site, there will be no further delays. Since the piling method will be ‘hit and miss’, i.e. drill a hole and then stop and re-plan if you hit a medieval wall, this alone could trigger delays.

With temporary traffic lights installed, local businesses are set for well over two years of misery around the Eastern Lane site as lorries thunder back and forth and Marygate traffic backs up along the New Bridge, Castlegate, and Hide Hill.

Total cost and NCC liability

The total cost is now running at £33.36m, compared with £28.3m in 2025 and £21.4m in 2021. The Borderlands ask has risen from an original £15m to £28.5m.

Finding subcontractors for this particularly difficult site has proved expensive (as was predicted by everyone except for NCC, apparently) and so the bids have been high. The Iran war and inflation have also been fingered for the cost rise.

NCC are asking Borderlands to reallocate funds from digital projects, but NCC – that is, Northumberland taxpayers – will also have to cough up millions extra, which they hope to get signed off by councillors in November.

The total spend NCC itself is liable for – excluding maintenance, insurance and further build problems – is £4,859,492, broken down as follows.

It’s interesting to compare this with the £5m refurbishment cost quoted last year on Facebook by a Maltings trustee who was outraged that anyone could ask NCC to spend this amount on their own building. It was presumably extracted from the report on alternatives that the Maltings Trust and NCC repeatedly declined to make public, despite using £120k of public money, and was a rare if not unique public disclosure of the refurbishment cost estimate.

If the project is refused by Borderlands or NCC committee, NCC will still be on the hook for £3.34m of design costs (Section 6.1 of the document). The discrepancy between this and the above figures is probably because some of this money is accounted for by Borderlands funding should the project go ahead.

Extremely poor national BCR

The Benefit-Cost Ratio for the project using a “revised value for money assessment” is revealed to be a pitiful 1.04 on a national scale (how much benefit there is nationally). BCR measures whether a project makes financial sense. A 1.04 value is more or less break-even, and almost certainly doesn’t take into account the harms that the project will do to the local economy – either in the short term through construction, or in the long term due to the impact on some of Berwick’s most loved views.

Unknown maintenance responsibility

The document states that NCC will lease the building on a peppercorn rent – and nowhere is it stated who will pay for the maintenance of this large and complex building. If NCC pay, then local taxpayers will be on the hook for it, for decades to come. Even if the Maltings Trust is theoretically responsible, any dip in income or general financial headwinds could wipe out profits and inevitably, it will be us picking up the bill. It’s questionable whether the Maltings was ever profitable since it was built in the 1990s, especially as it has been alleged that the Borough Council was making secret payments to it over several years. A larger, far more complex building is hardly likely to ensure profitability when the local population has not grown.

Massively increased visitor forecast

In the 2025 Maltings plan, 135,000 annual visitors were envisioned by 2030, compared with 60,000 tickets sold yearly for the existing building, although ‘visits’ and ‘tickets’ are different things. And yet the Borderlands document now forecasts 305,857 visitors ‘gross’ by 2031/2032. It seems likely that this extraordinary figure has been tailored to suit the business case and ramp up the BCR rather than being based on any kind of reality.