These are notes written by an attendee at the recent meeting about the future of Budleigh Hospital. It represents the attendee’s personal views.

The way in which ” rent” is being tackled is very novel but, as always, the devil is in the detail.

Owl hopes the League of Friends has access to good lawyers!

“Budleigh Hospital League of Friends AGM followed by Wellbeing Hub Q&A 16/06/16

Chair’s perspective

• According to Chair, Dr David Evans, Swire and Toby Williams have been ‘very helpful in ironing out problems’ – more info on this would be interesting – eg what has Swire actually done (probably just enabling the roll out of Tory ideological destruction of the NHS at a local level?!).

• Dr David Evans also reported that he thinks the wellbeing hub is a pioneering project, one that he believes will be a model of success that other community hospitals in Devon will want to follow. There was a confusing and bizarre message that we should be proud of what we have (an empty building?!). Perhaps he was referring to the work of the League of Friends who do seem to put a lot of work into something that must be very incredibly frustrating.

NHS Property Services

• A contract will be signed between the League of Friends and the RD&E FT that will allow the Wellbeing Hub to ‘overcome’ the commercial rent issue for charitable organisations.

• The League of Friends described this lease as a ‘compromise’. In practice all rent will still be commercial (as they kept saying, this is ‘a legal requirement’), however as the League of Friends has money (raised locally) that they want to invest into the building, they have agreed (verbally at this point), that the money invested by the League of Friends will be converted into a lease – so a £100,000 investment in the property will be translated into a reduction (% unclear) for charitable sector users.

Sustainability, administration, etc all unclear, my question was about clarifying what was initially just a mention of this lease/compromise, but the answer didn’t go far enough.

• However a local alternative therapies practitioner (eg I know of one who wanted to rent space) would probably be charged commercial rent and therefore unlikely to be feasible for them to work from/offer services from the wellbeing hub.

The wellbeing hub

• In September they hope to have some example services available. But then this was contradicted with no access to building until 2017.

• Building is still in reasonable condition and a report of the work done while closed has been issued to the League of Friends (cost of work maintaining the empty building could be an interesting FOI as the League of Friends did not specify).

• It was suggested that the closure has allowed time to consider and test what ideas will work for the hub. Not convinced by this logic – I am pretty sure the hospital demonstrated that.”