Council agrees property purchases as part of Bexhill medical centre deal

On Monday (January 6th), Rother District Council’s cabinet members agreed to move ahead with plans to purchase the freeholds of both the Old Town Surgery in De La Warr Road and the Little Common Surgery in Cooden Sea Road.

Cabinet members heard how the property purchases are part of a deal surrounding the council’s construction of a new medical centre in Brooklands Road.

Officers said the arrangement is required as the surgeries’ GP partners, who intend to relocate from the Little Common Surgery to the as-yet-unbuilt medical centre, are unable to proceed with the wider project until they are released from mortgages on their two existing properties.

To achieve this, Rother District Council intends to buy the properties and immediately lease them back to the GP partners. The Little Common surgery would eventually relocate to the new medical centre in Brooklands Road. The Old Town surgery would remain in place indefinitely (initially on a 25-year lease).

While officers described the project as a primarily commercial endeavour, cabinet members stressed the benefits of the new medical centre to the district.

Cllr Christine Bayliss (Lab), the council’s deputy leader and cabinet member for regeneration and economic development, said: “It will be a state-of-the-art GPs’ surgery and in terms of today’s announcement made by the prime minister about reducing waiting lists and moving care out of hospitals, I see somewhere like this playing a major role in that.

“That is something we can be proud of as Rother district councillors. Health isn’t in our ambit, but we are here providing the facilities for that to take place.”

Council leader Doug Oliver (Ind) said: “With the coming on of the mental health in Mount View Road, the diagnostic centre in Beeching Road, this new surgery that is going on in Little Common for the west of Bexhill, I think it just reflects the NHS confidence that Rother can deliver.

“Bexhill within Rother is becoming a centre of excellence and this enables residents of Rother to gravitate towards Bexhill.”

The full deal is expected to see the council purchase and lease-back both doctors surgeries, while also agreeing to both build the new Brooklands Road medical centre and then lease it to the NHS Sussex Integrated Care Board on pre-agreed terms.

Officers said this arrangement (which involves the individual agreements moving ahead simultaneously) would result in a financial return for the authority over the term of the leases. However, officers also noted how the Little Common purchase and lease-back would make a loss “in isolation” of the other elements of the deal.

Details of the sales are commercially confidential, but a report to cabinet notes how the purchase price of both properties would be “less than” the assessed market value.

The council secured planning permission to build the medical centre in June 2023. As part of its application, the council also secured permission to build three light industrial buildings on the same site, which were described at the time as being suitable for “flexible business uses”.

In their report to cabinet, officers said the council has secured £5m of Levelling Up funding for the scheme since this planning permission was granted. They also said the light industrial units are currently considered to be “not commercially viable in their current form”, but said this may not remain the case forever.