Adult social care day centre to be sold

A former adult social care centre, which closed last year as the building was left to fall in to a state of disrepair, is to be sold off.

Heswall Day Centre on Telegraph Road in Heswall, Wirral, shut its doors due to a heating failure and the service, which supported 52 adults, moved to other facilities.

Wirral Council found it would cost at least £500,000 to bring the building back into use and £5.6m for a full refurbishment, something the cash-strapped authority said it cannot afford.

Councillor Phil Gilchrist, said the situation was the reality of savings the council had to make over the years to its budget.

"The chickens have come home to roost because over the years to maintain staff and support, we have made savings with the buildings," the leader of the Liberal Democrat group said.

A council report said the building faced problems with asbestos and after the heating failure, further investigations were needed which involved digging up the floor and concluded no other reasonable options but to sell.

Labour councillor Mike Sullivan said the Heswall building was "no longer fit for purpose" and it was "not viable" to try and "put it back into a good state of repair".

Questions were raised about when the council began considering the centre for sale after Peter Linnane, whose son Mark used the centre, pointed out they had finished renovating the garden just one month before it closed.

Officers assured councillors the situation at Heswall was not something that had been anticipated last year.

The local authority said it would work with families and volunteers who had invested £19,000 into the centre's garden to relocate this to other centres.

Councillor Kieran Murphy, of the Green Party, questioned why the centre's condition was not brought up in budget discussions earlier this year, adding that it was "a knee jerk reaction to a financial situation and the result of decades of neglect of the buildings".

Council officers said there was capacity in other centres and there had been no reduction in people's care as a result of moving from Heswall.

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