Taxpayers face £13,000 bill to fix 'flimsy' doors on £2.3m beach huts

TAXPAYERS must cough up yet more money for beach huts in Milford that have now been found to have “unsuitable” doors just two years after being built.

New Forest District Council faces a £13,000 bill for replacing 19 doors, having paid around £1.8m in May 2017 for a project to replace 119 huts following catastrophic storm damage to the previous structures.

The £1m overspend on the £2.3m scheme, to which beach hut owners themselves also contributed £430,000, prompted a leading Liberal Democrat district councillor to refer NFDC to the district auditor.

It has now emerged that the council is set to pay more than half of a £22,000 scheme to replace doors that “have not performed as expected”.

The project contractor is set to contribute £7,000 and beach hut owners will pay £2,000 towards the work.

However, beach hut owners claim NFDC was warned the proposed doors would be unsuitable long before work started.

Beach Hut Owners Association spokesperson Paul Watson said: “They fitted flimsy doors filled with porous material which are self-evidently unsuitable for this exposed environment.”

Mr Watson said problems soon became apparent, but claimed that rather than admitting a mistake had been made, NFDC tried to justify the specification by claiming weak doors were a deliberate design feature.

He says NFDC’s own surveys showed that after five months, 59 doors required attention ranging from redecoration to replacement, and by 17 months this figure had reached 79.

“During the design process, which started in 2014, I pointed out in writing that doors needed to be ‘suitably robust solid wood’,” said Mr Watson.

He continued: “Milford beach hut owners know from many years of experience that only solid doors are suitable to withstand regular pounding from waves and shingle.”

It is claimed that despite emails and verbal representations, the views of the BHOA were ignored.

Mr Watson said: “Many of the doors show evidence of delamination, hence it is extraordinary that as recently as March this year NFDC maintained that all but 12 doors "remain sound".

He claimed the only guidance given for the original doors was that they should be "Howdens FD30 or similar” – a type of door that is fire-resistant for 30 minutes.

Mr Watson said: “Interestingly, late in 2018, under the heading ‘door remedial works schedule’, the architect Snug proposed an alternative door. This time for a door with a hardwood core and lipped on all four sides to prevent water ingress.”

The revelation has also prompted criticism from Cllr David Harrison, leader of NFDC’s Liberal Democrat opposition group.

Cllr Harrison told the A&T: “The Conservatives are already privately admitting that they grossly overspent on beach huts, a sheer vanity project wasting taxpayers’ money at a time of austerity and cut backs right across local services.”

Lib Dem group environment spokesman Cllr Malcolm Wade said: “This is an absolute insult to our New Forest taxpayers that we must, yet again, cough up for another Conservative failure of management in planned sea defences.

"Their incompetence over the whole sorry saga of the multi-coloured beach huts seems to be an endless drain on public funds.”

A spokesperson for NFDC confirmed: “Some of the 119 beach hut doors from the project completed in 2017 at Milford have not performed as expected and so 19 are being replaced.”