1 December 2019 —
Ealing residents have been urged to reject the scheme proposed by the Charity
Commission that would allow Ealing Council to sell off the Victoria Hall as
part of its Town Hall deal with a hotel operator.
The Victoria Hall was built next to Ealing Town Hall with
money raised through a Victorian crowdfunding campaign. It is owned by a
charitable Trust set up in 1893 to run the Victoria Hall for the benefit of
local people. The Hall has hosted countless meetings, entertainments and
exhibitions over the years.
However, for nearly two years the Council has been trying to
persuade the Charity Commission to allow it to amend the Trust rules so that
the Victoria Hall can be included in a £2.5m sell-off of the Town Hall site.
The Commission has just published the draft of a Scheme that
would clear the way for this to happen, subject to the result of a public
consultation that is due to end on 26 December 2019.
Roger Green, chair of The Friends of the Victoria Hall (FoVH),
said: “Even a cursory look at the Charity Commission proposal shows that this
would be a very poor deal indeed for Ealing residents. They’d likely lose
affordable access to facilities that have been serving the community for 126
years.
“The prospect of
losing the Borough’s largest indoor community space to a private company is bad
enough, but the terms under which it would happen are just too soft. Incredibly,
the Council seems to be prepared to let the whole of the Town Hall and Victoria
Hall go for less than the price of a three-bedroom flat in Dickens Yard. That
can’t be right.”
A FoVH team is going
through the fine detail of the Charity Commission’s draft Victoria Hall Trust
Scheme in order to lodge detailed objections. FoVH has requested an extension
to the consultation period which it believes is absurdly short in the run-up to
the Christmas break.
