BRIEFING REPORT Mount Edgcumbe Holiday Accommodation

Mount Edgcumbe House is the former home of the . Surrounded by formal gardens and set in a Grade I listed landscape, the country park covers 865 acres of the in South East . It is located in Cornwall but is a short passenger ferry ride from Plymouth on the Ferry.

Mount Edgcumbe Country Park is now jointly owned by Plymouth City Council (PCC) and Cornwall Council (CC). Under the 1968 Countryside Act the joint authorities (PCC and CC) are required by act of statute to provide free and safe public access to this landscape. The park is a health and wellbeing asset for the Plymouth and surrounding community with over 250,000 visitors a year, meeting numerous objectives in the vision for Plymouth. The Councils provide an equal annual subsidy which currently totals £224,000 per annum.

For the past three years Mount Edgcumbe has been following a strategy of opening up disused buildings as self catering holiday accommodation to bring a new profitable income into the park to reduce the PCC and CC subsidy. This proposal builds on this strategy by opening up an underutilised area of the park, Wilderness Point and delivers £53,000 additional annual revenue to the park each year.

Our vision around holiday accommodation can be described as:

A growing collection of unique, eclectic holiday rental properties which will drive new visitors to the park who will stay longer, spend more and to help support the micro-businesses.

Our strategy for holiday accommodation to deliver this vision is:

Better utilising our assets with sensitive, low impact transformation of dilapidated buildings or under used areas into profitable holiday accommodation.

This strategy is also employed by the National Trust who run similar estates to Mount Edgcumbe. The holiday accommodation strategy for Mount Edgcumbe is part of the overall Commercial Strategy for Mount Edgcumbe which is designed to increase commercial income to reduce subsidy from the Councils. This also fits well with the Council-wide Commercial Enterprise 2.0 Strategy. Some of the properties have historically been residential, some provided to estate staff in the past. Some of the potential properties are in new locations, such as the proposed tree houses at Wilderness Point or the glamping huts we have situated near the cricket pitch. What links them all is that they will appeal to tourists wishing to explore the area and are pitched at a variety of different market niches.

Over the last two years the first properties have been brought online using volunteers where possible and keeping conversion costs as low as possible. To take the properties to market work has been undertaken with two private sector partners, Classic Cottages and Quality Unearthed. These companies specialise in letting holiday accommodation as an agent and are best placed to help drive the most revenue by delivering the marketing and bookings.

V1 09/04/18 OFFICIAL PLYMOUTH CITY COUNCIL This business case is specifically about the next four properties that are to be brought to market for which funding of £622,000 is sought to achieve this:

 We will build three separate units of holiday accommodation which will be marketed as “Wilderness Point Treehouses”. Each unit will essentially be a log cabin on stilts, a studio apartment with en-suite bathroom and outside decking with rope bridge access from the existing roadway. It will be situated alongside mature trees but not in or fixed to the trees to prevent damage.  Alongside this, we will convert another building, the disused toilets and stores attached to the Coastguards Lookout at Rame Head. The conversion will provide a studio apartment with spectacular views and a new improved public toilet. The part of the building leased to the coastguard will remain unchanged.

The funding will be service area borrowing, the repayments for which are covered from rental income.

RECOMMENDED DECISION It is recommended that the Leader of the Council:  Approves the Business Case  Allocates £622,000 within the Capital Programme funded by service borrowing from Mount Edgcumbe Revenue Budget  Delegates the award of the contract to Anthony Payne, Strategic Director for Place

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