A THUNDERBIRDS-THEMED hotel, a multi-storey car park, and a former police station are just some of the assets to go under the hammer this year.
The cash-strapped Slough Borough Council is eyeing to sell eight assets in order to reduce its £760m borrowing debt.
These include the Moxy Hotel, 22-26 Windsor Road, office block Upton Lodge, and Hatfield multi-storey car park. It also includes land and buildings that were earmarked for housing, such as land at Langley College, Rochford Gardens, and a former police station and Merry Makers pub on Trelawney Avenue.
The freehold of the 244-room Moxy Hotel, which has a book value of about £20.2m, will be sold later this year and will continue to operate as is, a cabinet sub-committee on asset disposals was told during an update report.
So far, the council has accumulated £172m from its asset sales, such as the over £100m sale of the former Akzo Nobel site, and believes that figure will increase to over £200m before April.
READ MORE: Slough's Thunderbirds-themed Moxy Hotel could be sold off
The council has to pay back £406m of its short-term loans by this September. Cllr Rob Anderson (Lab: Britwell & Northborough), lead member for financial oversight, said half of that debt has been repaid and if these eight assets are sold, the debt will be paid back in full.
He said: “That will cauterize off the one thing I was most concerned about when I took over this portfolio is just the scale of the short-term borrowing we had to fund somehow.
“Interest rates are going up and we know that if we can repay that temporary borrowing, that pools in a massive amount of cash that we were going to have to pay in borrowing costs over the next year back into the budget, and it gives us absolute certainty because the rest of the borrowing will at least be long-term and at fixed rates, meaning we will know what exactly what we have to do.
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“It will still obviously cost money to service that debt, but it will be a known debt and we will be back in a position we were in prior to 2016 where we are only temporarily borrowing for short-term things where it’s strategically important and not using it to avoid paying high-interest rates and leave us open to the market changes we have seen recently.”
The meeting took place on Thursday, January 12.
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