Company branded incompetent over rugby stand ‘shambles’

Among other problems, the North Stand at Craven Park was clad in blue rather than red club colours and was designed with only two sets of toilets for up to 2,600 fans.

Hull East MP Karl Turner said project managers, NPS Humber, which is partly owned by Hull Council, should be taken back in-house.

He said the quote was around £400,000 to reclad the stand, adding: “NPS in my opinion are completely incompetent.”

He said NPS had “completely failed on a grand scale”, adding: “Their bill for design and facilitating the stand is 13 per cent of the overall build. This is a company that has no experience whatsoever in stadium builds – they might as well have given me the 13 per cent.

“I think it is an outrage that they are getting anything out of it. I don’t know what’s wrong with bringing commercial property in-house”

NPS Humber provides estates management, design, repairs and maintenance for the council, as a result of a deal in 2008 under the former Lib Dem administration, which saw 120 local authority workers transfer to the firm.

The service agreement runs for 15 years, but there is a break clause this financial year.

In February, it was revealed that the club had resigned from the project board set up by Hull Council, which is paying for the majority of the scheme.

At the time club chairman Neil Hudgell said they risked ending up with a “glorified office block”, with much smaller windows looking onto the pitch from sponsors’ lounges than planned, and claimed poor management had led to delays which had cost them around £750,000 to £1m in revenue. He also blamed the council for delays in securing European funding and said the development had been “shambolic” from the start.

A back-bench councillor said yesterday there was a “widespread belief among the Labour Group (that NPS) is not working for them”.

Coun Phil Webster, a board director on NPS Humber, said the colour of the ancillary building, which houses the hospitality space, was too late to change at this stage. But he said fans would see an improvement as the seats in the stand were going to be mainly white with some in red spelling out the name “Rovers”.

Powder-coating the stand would cost just short of £100,000, with just the pitch-facing side costing £40,000 – “and if they do that there’s no guarantees on the panels”.

He said: “He (the MP) is entitled to his opinion, but I would refute it.

“It is going to proceed as it is.

“There is no option for major changes at this late stage, if we are going to get it open for the World Cup Games in October.

“The ancillary building will remain blue, but there will be white and red in the stand.

“It’s not what I expected – the original artist’s impression showed a glass frontage – but the end result will still be stunning.

“It’s still a building site and it’s difficult to see what it will be like when it is finished. Fans I spoke to at the weekend said they couldn’t see what the problem was.”

But he added: “In my opinion, communication between all parties has not been as good as it should have been. There have been a lot of good things that have been done but there have been a lot of mistakes. I don’t want to apportion blame but no one is blameless through this process.”

Hull Council is borrowing most of the money for the project, which includes classrooms which double as function rooms on match days and nearly 50 starter offices, with £2.6m coming from the European Regional Development Fund. NPS Humber passed requests for comment to Hull Council.