Richard Bigg
speaker
138 appearances
5 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2024
last heard Feb 2025
Richard Bigg’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
I feel that I've been saying it constantly for months and months and months, and it appears to have fallen on deaf ears because people are still telling me we're not committing to it. We have process. I have to say on the report, the report I know that Dan Jones will work extremely hard and quickly with the team that he's already put in place to provide that report.
It then has to go through the procurement process. And the procurement process for a local government, just in case you're not aware, takes a minimum of 12 weeks. So that's three months. So we can't do much about that figure because that's set as a process that local government has to go through. So by the time you take that out, we're actually only giving Dan and his team...
about six or eight weeks, about 240 hours, to produce a very complicated brief, ready for getting the right people in to rebuild the Harlequin, which we've said we want to do.
Maybe I should stop there and let you come back.
I do feel, Councillor Essex, you probably answered your same question there. Apart from throw loads of resources and get a second team, all the time we're actually focusing on sorting out... a temporary venue, we're not concentrating on getting the harlequin back.
And with the threat of local government reorganisation coming up in two or three years time, the last thing I want to do is spend money and time doing a temporary venue and we get to the point where the minister has locked the safe and we can't deliver the theatre that I've promised.
And I want to keep to my promises. I try to keep to them all the time. And therefore, I think our focus must be... particularly as as you said we don't know under a shadow authority and everything else what potentially can happen so we need to make sure that we've done everything possible to keep our eye on the goal really which is to reopen the Harlequin Theatre.
That's what we said right at the beginning we would aim to do and that's what I want to do. But I'm certainly happy to sit down and talk the options through but I genuinely do not want our team directed the wrong way when we have a goal. We need to meet that goal and everybody I've spoken to right from the early days of closing it has been quite clear
that their aim, what they want us to do, is reopen the Harlequin. So now, I've said we'll reopen the Harlequin, and we've put 10 million pounds in, they've now said, oh, now we want a three million pound temporary venue. You know, the focus has always been on getting the Harlequin reopened. That's where I've asked the officers to concentrate.
We have got the potential of doing a temporary option that could well become an additional performance space for the borough going forward. So I think there's a lot of positives in this and I really feel that this is constant on the temporary. We are looking at other options. We've already We've found another option for a 300 seat performance space that groups have been invited to.
Unfortunately, they haven't been able to make the visits that we've put on so far, but we'll continue to do that, and we will continue to investigate other options, but investing Two, three, four million pounds over two, three, four years when our actual aim is to deliver the Harlequin again seems to me to be taking our eye off the ball somewhat and I don't want to do that.
So I have been listening but I also listened to what people were telling me at the public consultation and well before. They want their Harlequin back. So that's what we will be concentrating on doing.
We hadn't had all the surveys done in the summer of 24. They weren't done until September, October 24. But I think the other two questions, and I think we've touched on it about procurement procedures, but I will ask Dan if he could just come in and clarify it.
It definitely was on the long list, Jonathan, sorry. It was on the long list, I'm sure.
No, no, no, no. The long list was produced.
You asked us to commit. Always committing to me sounds like a promise. And the only thing I can say is we will do our absolute best. The LGR decision on whether Surrey are in the first phase, which will be rushed through, or the second phase.
So perhaps on Tuesday I can come back to you and tell you the likelihood of doing that. But we will do our absolute best. That's all I can say at the moment to make sure everything's signed up and running before any sign of a shadow authority because we want to get it open.
We said a performance space at Christmas. I think we did a big top the year before that was, I can't remember the total number. So if we were talking about a temporary performance space for the winter, that would have been around those numbers.
Thank you very much, Councillor Harrison. So I take on board what you're saying, that the number wasn't in there, but the performance space that we'd already done before for the Panto was an option and was considered.
I appreciate and take on board the fact that the figure wasn't actually in there, but we would have assumed that.
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