Elvaston Castle Tour

Community groups are being encouraged to make a bid to buy a castle estate from a Derbyshire council before any offers to “deep-pocketed” private investors.

Derbyshire County Council is triggering the six-month-long legally-mandated asset of community value procedure for the Elvaston Castle and Country Park Estate.

This provides community groups with the opportunity to make a bid for the site ahead of any release to the market.

However, the current estimate for the county council’s now-scrapped plans for the estate is £50 million, as of November. The authority stresses that any group, organisation or individual interested in the site will have their own costs for whatever scheme they devise.

Cllr Barry Lewis, council leader, and Chris Henning, the authority’s executive director for place, both confirm that talks with the National Trust and English Heritage remain ongoing.

Talks with the two organisations, which oversee many stately homes, castles and other historic assets – with charged entry – had comprised expert advice for the council’s plan but could also now include potential ownership.

Mr Henning said: “We have reignited those conversations. We as a council just can’t afford to do what we want to do with it.

“There is inevitably a conservation deficit but we are confident that a group, organisation or individual with the right vision or, frankly, deep pockets, can overcome these issues.”

The council is not attaching any restriction to retain free entry or public access to the estate and is open to all ideas, its leadership says.

Costs to the council are now £800,000 per year, with the estate bringing in £400,000 annually – leaving a gap of £400,000 – with most of the cost being staff to run and maintain the site.

Alongside this is a raft of repairs and maintenance that runs into the millions of pounds, with the council now only committed to “critical” work “to arrest decline” and that which is required to uphold safety for visitors and staff.

Much of the required work to the castle itself has been “paused” while the council goes through the next stages of the process to offload the historic building and wider estate.

Individual rooms in the castle require tens of thousands of pounds to be spent on them and this is unavoidable for any new owner due to its Grade-II* listed status, leadership says.

The same goes for many of the buildings around the castle estate, such as the gas house, stables and kennels, which are all nationally protected and have a legal requirement for their upkeep – which would pass to the new owner.

This means demolition of the historic buildings is strictly off the table.

Richard Bonner, the council’s head of countryside services, said the best use for many of the listed buildings on the estate would be for their original uses to return.

Much of the work to date has been to prevent dry rot from decimating the entire castle, with vast sections of walls and ceilings having to be torn down and rebuilt.

Mr Bonner said this process is “invasive” and “comes at a very considerable cost”.

Cllr Lewis detailed that “There has been previous private sector interest in the site” such as turning the site into a hotel in 2004, and hoped that interested buyers would look at the whole estate, not just “individual parts”.

He said: “They will need to make sure it washes its own face. It is not going to be cheap and straightforward.”

Cllr Lewis said: “Due to our financial situation we have had to think about its future use. Adult social care and children’s services are not getting any cheaper. It is beyond our capabilities to maintain this on a day to day basis.

“We need to think of long-term solutions for what is a nationally important asset.”

Costs for the estate sat at £15 million in 2009, officials say, and this rose to £33 million by the time the council had formed its master plan.

This increased to £45 million three years ago and now estimates place the cost at £50 million, as of November.

Cllr Lewis says he hopes community groups will be able to “leverage” grant funding in order to make a bid for the site.

However, the council itself said that grant funding to support its own plans – in the region of £13.3 million – was no longer available, which ultimately led to it scrapping its long-held plan in November.

In November it had said it would need to put in a significant amount of work to “pro-actively” market the estate for sale “with a chance of success” and said it was not able to do so.

Last week it confirmed it was touting interest in the potential sale of the 321-acre site, which it has owned for 50 years.

Cllr Lewis says the estate is “rather significant but rather dilapidated”.

When asked about the cost of the redevelopment of the estate to any prospective buyer, Cllr  Lewis responded: “How long is a piece of string?”

He said he hoped the new owners would retain public access to the estate but that it can also fund its own upkeep, saying it “deserves to have a future, but sadly we do not have the resources”.

Cllr Lewis: “I am hopeful it will remain free to access. There may be areas at certain times that would need some restrictions, just as you might if you go to any stately home or National Trust property.

“If you go to any National Trust property you need to pay to go in the property and the park but the grounds are free to access.”

Cllr Lewis said just like the council the National Trust and English Heritage are financially constrained and may not be able to take the site on, but would continue talks.

He said private investors had previously shown interest and was confident this would remain the case.

Cllr Lewis said: “We have owned this now for a number of decades and over that time we have tried to find solutions to do the work that needs to be done. Our situation as a local authority is one where we find ourselves restricted constantly and under financial pressure.

“It is not a conclusion we have reached recently, it is a conclusion we reached decades ago and have been having this constant conversation about what to do with Elvaston Castle.”

He said outwardly the buildings look largely up to scratch but closer looks reveal “multitudes of issues” and inside of the castle and other structures are “many more”.

Cllr Lewis says now is the right time to “test the waters” with community groups for a potential sale and that the authority was “willing to work with everyone”.