Community representatives in South Bristol have questioned a council decision to convert a hall built specifically to provide space for young people to meet into homes for young people with special needs.
One said the decision to transfer the Jubilee Hall in Bedminster to provide homes for a supported living facility showed the dilemma faced by local councils like Bristol’s, but warned that the city risked losing all its local youth services.
Earlier this month, Bristol Live revealed that the council chiefs had decided not to find another community use for the Jubilee Hall at the bottom of Wedmore Vale, after its leaseholder moved out.
And what happened next has caused some controversy in this corner of South Bristol, and shone a light on what – in this case at least – is two conflicting but desperate needs for young people in the community.
The Jubilee Hall had been the home for the boxing club run by local Knowle West legend Chris ‘Skemer’ Winters for five years, but Skemers Gym is now in bigger premises on an industrial estate at the other end of the Northern Slopes at Novers Lane.
The hall was built in the 1930s by the community itself – the families who moved into the new council estates of the Malago Vale in Bedminster and Knowle Park and Knowle West at the top of the Wedmore Vale hill.
A plaque on the front of the building makes it clear it was built specifically for local young people in the community, and news of Skemer’s move prompted a number of local youth groups and organisations to get in touch with the council about the possibility of taking on the hall.
Community halls and buildings in this area are few and far between – many groups meet in a nearby primary school hall and there is a community hall up and over the other side of Windmill Hill, but the Jubilee Hall, in a central location where Bedminster and Knowle meet, was much sought after.
But anyone inquiring about taking it on was left disappointed. The council officers explained that, when a building the council owns becomes available, its availability is first circulated around the council’s internal departments.
And there’s one department at the council that is desperate for buildings and sites – the one responsible for making sure young adults with learning difficulties have somewhere supported to live.
There is a massive national shortage of housing, supported living places and accommodation for people with special needs. Any parent of a teenager with special needs usually finds they end one battle to get the right education provision, and then step straight into another when the question is asked about the transition to adult life.
Too many end up still living at home for years, maybe decades, with ageing parents increasingly struggling to cope, while others are vulnerable to being exploited by slum landlords or unscrupulous companies who set up charities to run ‘supported living’ accommodation but which one Bristol MP described as ‘benefit farms’.
The other factor for the council, which has the responsibility to make sure adults with special needs or learning difficulties who are unable to live completely independently are in appropriate and safe accommodation, is that this is often very expensive.
The shortage in Bristol often means young adults with special needs in their 20s end up living in supported living miles away from Bristol, with the city council and its taxpayers paying another authority or a private provider of supported living a small fortune.
The ambition is to reduce that by Bristol having its own accommodation of this kind in the communities where the young people already are.
There are a number of small-scale projects to create new supported living accommodation – one at the Inns Court end of the Knowle West estate was delayed this year by the discovery of a huge number of slow worms – but many more are needed, so when Jubilee Hall was flagged as being empty, the council team responsible for trying to create more jumped at the chance.
The project would see the hall converted into four en-suite supported living units, along with a shared kitchen and facilities for onsite care staff. The hall is on a fairly big plot of land, which would make ideal communal spaces and gardens for the residents.
A spokesperson for Bristol City Council said: “The council are now seizing an opportunity which will enable the hall to be renovated in order to provide bespoke, urgently needed, specialised supported housing for Young People with disabilities.
“This approach will allow us to create accessible accommodation designed with the unique requirements of the residents at its heart as well as deliver important savings for the council,” she added.
But while there is clearly a need for such accommodation, the dilemma means it takes away one of the few community buildings in the area.
The Jubilee Hall is right on the border of three different council wards – it’s in Windmill Hill ward, but Knowle West’s Filwood ward is across the road and the Knowle is 20 yards around the corner. Tessa Fitzjohn is the former Green Party councillor for Windmill Hill until she stepped down at May’s election. She said Jubilee Hall’s future should at least have been discussed in the community.
“With increased housing in this area, community facilities are an important asset, and it would have been great to at least discuss alternative ideas,” she said.
Jai Breitnauer stood for the Green Party in the Filwood ward in May’s local elections, and then for the Green Party in South Bristol in the General Election in July. She said she was ‘not happy about this’.
“I’m the parent of two autistic teens and we do worry about the lack of supported living options for the future,” she said.
“But I’m also a trustee of a youth charity that has been looking for a home since 2021 – these halls and centres and old churches go on sale and we are outbid by developers. Now we are looking at retail parks and industrial sites on the edge of the city when youth services need to be local,” she added.
Jai said the answer could be for the council to be more robust at demanding developers include small supported living accommodation be factored in to larger housing developments.
More than two thousand new homes are being built or proposed as part of the Bedminster Green regeneration project over the other side of Windmill Hill from the Jubilee Hall, but developers have so far only proposed build-to-rent flats or purpose-built student accommodation, as developers took advantage of the failure of the council to draw up a robust masterplan for the area.
“A more strategic approach to planning is required to make sure what developers want to build meets the needs of the city,” she said.
“Why can’t Longmoor Village (the development of 510 new homes on the edge of Ashton Vale that was given planning approval recently) be a supported living village? What’s happening with the zoo? There are plenty of large development sites around the city that could be prioritised for this important type of housing without reducing access to sites suitable for youth services,” she added.