FoHP Proposal in brief.

While all our plans have been available online as they developed, the final proposal that we put to the Administrators is not, because it contains genuinely confidential commercial information. In brief, it was a co-investing shared venture between FOHP Trust and a commercial operator, backed with £750k of guaranteed finance, alongside current funding bids or approaches from funders totalling £450k, with dRMM contributing £60-90k of design work, plus a comprehensive funding search by an Institute of Fundraisers expert showing we could ‘absolutely’ raise £1.6M capital to achieve and open a permanent building within 3 years. We could start straight away – dRMM had pulled an all-nighter for us and designed a beautiful but simple and cheap temporary structure.

In terms of operational capacity not only were we committed to working with the current team of staff and volunteers who have done so much to make this season a success so far, but our operator partner would bring in additional expertise and experienced staff to fill gaps and cope with a step-change in visitor numbers. The first thing we promised to do was actually count footfall – there is literally no data about how many people have been on the pier, let alone intelligence about who they were or what they thought.

Our approach, of course, made a full and undoubted commitment to prioritise maintenance and to sustain the in-house engineering team which holds the crucial ‘corporate memory’ of the pier.

To top all that.......we offered to pay a purchase price of £55k.  Without seeing the plans of others none of us can be categorically sure that it was the best option but it set a pretty high bar…