Places for sale on controversial yacht as health funding ends

Funding for the boat, which cost NHS Hull £500,000 three years ago, runs out in September after the demise of the One Hull quango, which paid its £1.3m running costs.

The team behind the Cat Zero boat are selling spaces on board for two yacht races, the Fastnet and the North Atlantic Challenge, and are offering private, corporate and school packages.

Delivery officer Sean Cahill confirmed any funds raised would go towards the youth programme.

He said: “Right from day one it was in the business plan that we would attempt to be self-funding over three years.

“It will be purely down to how many business partners we sign up, how many business and school days we sell, the North Atlantic Challenge and Fastnet as to what we can and can’t do.”

Mr Cahill insisted the scheme had helped 200 of the 300 young people who had come through the course into education, training or employment.

There has been criticism of the latest move as the yacht will now be competing against other long-established charities.

A member of the newly elected Labour administration at Hull Council, Phil Webster, said there was “not a cat in hell’s chance” of bailing it out.

He said it had not been “morally right” that young people “who’d been working their socks off to get us up the education tables leave school struggling to find work and then see these people going off on jollies on a yacht”.