COUNCILLORS have voted to continue with a landmark project to build a new theatre in the city centre after the plans were left in tatters by rising costs.

Worcester City Council revealed it has been forced into pulling the plug on plans to turn the listed Scala Theatre in Angel Place in Worcester into a 500-seat venue after seeing the gap in the budget rocket to £3.5 million since the start of the year – blaming rising costs for the spiralling bill.

The council will now be pushing ahead on redesigning a smaller 300-seat venue after receiving the backing of councillors.

Green councillor Tom Piotrowski said all he could see was a “catalogue of mishaps and perhaps incompetence”.

READ MORE: Plan for 500-seat Scala Theatre in Worcester ditched for smaller venue

“How on earth we’ve got to this point, spending four million pounds of public money without conducting independent and thorough consultation with the local arts scene is beyond belief,” he said.

Cllr Piotrowski said he still needed to be convinced to trust any future plans because the old ones had been “embarrassing.”

The project, which was being funded by nearly £18 million in government Future High Street Fund money, has been drastically reduced ever since the money was awarded in 2020.

The city council’s Labour leader Cllr Lynn Denham had called for an investigation into the fiasco and said it was necessary to understand what had gone wrong.

READ MORE: Labour promise review into Scala Theatre fiasco

The council’s joint leader said it was a “huge shock” to find out the budget gap and faced “many sleepless nights” over what could be done to salvage it.

“I don’t think we want to give up on this, but I think it’s finding the right thing and the right way forward,” she said at the policy and resources committee meeting in the Guildhall on Tuesday (July 25).

Cllr Denham said a “wonderful thing” could still be created in both the listed Scala and Corn Exchange buildings.

READ MORE: New multi-million-pound Scala Theatre in Worcester may be ‘unusable’

The council’s managing director David Blake said the project had always received support from “key stakeholders” and it was unfair to say the council had not spoken to the city’s arts organisations.

Mr Blake said there had been “radio silence and no correspondence” while early designs for the theatre were being put together and that was “probably a mistake.”

One stipulation the government gave when awarding the Future High Streets Fund money to the city was that it would have to be spent by March 2024 and the council’s managing director is praying for ministers to extend the deadline admitting at least a minimum of six months extra was needed.

“The clock was ticking very fast a few months ago and it seems to be accelerating every day at the moment,” he said.

Labour councillor Jabba Riaz said the original plan for the Scala and the rest of Angel Place, compared to now, looked as though the council was trying desperately to “fit a square peg into a round hole” and the decisions around the project were “top-down rather than bottom-up.”