It is no secret that the Union has struggled financially in the last couple of years. (Why would it be a secret, this is your Union!) The University has recognised this and 18 months ago agreed to step in and help us plan and finance our future. They had agreed to give us a £5.5million ‘gift’ to rebuild Union South. Unfortunately once we started scoping out the project it became clear that this wasn’t enough and so they agreed to a second £5.5 million as a loan. We will pay this back to them over the next 20 years and there is a full and very carefully considered business plan that has underpins that..

There is of course a risk to taking on this development. We are in no doubt that the advantages massively outweigh the disadvantages of doing nothing but we do accept that there may be unforeseen problems along the way. That is why as an organisation we keep a full Risk register and monitor and manage problems on a minute by minute basis. For this particular project this is updated in line with the project plan and constantly monitored to ensure that there is no slippage. There are contingency plans and alternatives for when things do go wrong however we keep these to a minimum. 

An example of where we have minimised risk is in the phasing of the building. The largest risk to us is if the timeline of the build slips and we miss the opening of Freshers 2009. This would be a serious problem however with the phasing the way round that it is there is no way that the new venue would not be ready for Freshers 2009. This is important as it will be by far our largest and most popular commercial operation and it was deemed an unacceptable risk that there was even an outside chance it would not be ready for Freshers 2009.

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