Luton Town chief executive Gary Sweet has urged patience in the building of The club’s new stadium because ’world has changed’ since plans were first submitted four years ago.
Yesterday’s confirmation that Capital and Regional had not appealed the High Court’s refusal of their Newlands Park legal challenge brought to an end a long-running wrangle which delayed the development of both that mixed-use scheme and one at Power Court, where a new 17,500-seat stadium will be built.
It now means that 2020 Developments, the property arm of Luton Town Football Club, can press ahead with both regeneration schemes but, because the plans were first submitted back in 2016, that means refreshing the plans and seeking investment, with the changing retail landscape and Brexit key drivers.
“When we started this, the word Brexit hadn’t been created,” Sweet said, adding: “The world has changed. The retail world has changed as well. It doesn’t mean we want to jettison retail, what we want to do is create what is effectively the first next generation retail park in the UK, which is a retail park designed for the future, not necessarily for the past, which most of them are.”
While 2020 explore new funding, Sweet confirmed that they already have interested parties, but also that it doesn’t mean building works are about to begin.
Talking to BBC Three Counties Radio of yesterday’s historic news, the Hatters chief exec explained: “It doesn’t mean that we get the diggers on site tomorrow and start building things. We have got to go through a detailed planning application phase at this stage.
“We’ve got to find funders for the elements of the scheme which we don’t intend to keep, such as they retail elements and the office elements at Newlands Park and some apartments et cetera at Power Court.
“We’re going through a soft redesign. When we first created these, some of them are nearly five years old and, actually, the world’s changed in five years.
“We’re needing to update those designs, so there’s still quite a bit of work to do, but what this does mean is that it pretty much guarantees that there will be a football stadium at Power Court for Luton Town Football Club in the not to distant future.
“I’m a Luton fan too. I’m as eager as anyone to get in there and start moving but, there is a lot of work, so I’m just asking for everybody to have a bit of patience with us.
“We’ve had loads of patience so far and we’ve gone through such a long process of planning, but in the scheme of things, moving football stadiums, on average, is about ten years. If you look at everyone else who has tried to move, and in some cases Brighton’s a lot longer than that, but we’re doing OK.
“This is a big, big scheme that we’re managing ourselves, two huge developments, so it does need to be done properly. That’s the most important thing and it does need a bit of time.”
In his match-day programme notes for Luton’s Boxing Day 3-3 draw with Fulham, Sweet wrote about the High Court’s decision to throw out Capital and Regional’s Judicial Review application, saying and the possibility of an appeal.
He wrote: ‘From a personal point of view, I believe they would be utterly foolish to commit to do so given the facts in front of them and given their rapidly diminishing popularity amongst their future customer base, notwithstanding the complete waste of significant money required to attack and defend the arguments.
‘If this was a betting market only a serial gambling addict would keep backing the wrong horse.’
Asked today if he was surprised that the retail group had finally decided to admit defeat, Sweet said: “I was more surprised they actually took the JR on and more surprised, going back nearly four years ago, that they competed and challenged against us, because it would have been much easier just to have worked with us, which we could’ve done then.
“If they saw the vision that we were creating, they would have seen that, actually, we were always going to win this battle.”
