March 20, 2018 4.35 pm This story is over 72 months old

City Council buys two Lincoln NCP car parks for £6.6m

Another significant purchase by the council.
The Brayford Street Car Park in Lincoln

City of Lincoln Council has bought two NCP car parks in the city for £6.6 million as the authority aims to make better use of its resources.

The purchases of the Brayford Street and St Rumbold Street car parks come as the council adopted a more commercial strategy after significant cuts in funding from central government.

The council bought the car parks in September 2017 from Chariot Investment Holdings based in Luton, and has leased them back to NCP.

In addition to the two car parks, the council borrowed £13 million to buy the Travelodge building under construction on Tentercroft Street.

The building is set to be completed later this year and the council will lease it to Travelodge for 25 years.

Travelodge will have the option of extending the lease for a further 25 years and the council hopes to fully repay the loan within 30 years.

Leader of City of Lincoln Council, Councillor Ric Metcalfe, said that these investments showed that the authority was pursuing a more commercial strategy.

He said: “We’ve exhausted all of the efficiency savings we can make. We can really only reduce spending by cutting services which is something we don’t want to do.

“What we’ve said is our priority should be to try and generate more income. One way of doing this is to be more entrepreneurial, more commercial in our approach, acquire assets that are income-generating and we can use that income to support the cost of local services because that’s the direction in which government want us to go.”

“We’ve been on with trying to make better use of our asset base, because this might also mean selling some of the council’s assets in order to acquire others, for the last two or three years.”