COUNCIL leader Daniel Yates has vowed to help make the i360 a success and said scrapping it is “not an option”.

In the local Labour Party’s latest pledge ahead of the council elections Mr Yates said his party wants to give people in the city the chance to have their say on the future of the attraction following its financial problems.

But Mr Yates said the party would not consider shutting the attraction down.

Mr Yates added: “We have to find a way to make it work. It has got to do the things it was built to do such as support the redevelopment of the surrounding area.

“Our solution is to look at all of the options to make it a successful attraction. This includes looking at having someone else take ownership of it, possibly the council.”

In the original financial arrangement Brighton and Hove City Council was to receive £570,000 in interest repayments each June and December, in addition to the funds needed to repay the loan capital, after securing the £36.2 million Government loan that made the creation of the seafront viewing tower possible. The council has used the £2.4m received from the i360 so far for seafront regeneration; landscaping the area around the attraction and pledging a further £1m towards restoring Madeira Terrace.

But as visitor numbers were not as high as predicted when the Public Works Loan Board application was made, last June the tower asked the council to reduce those £570,000 interest repayments to £25,000 until 2024 while they build the business.

Bosses were keen to assure residents that the £922,000 payments being made twice a year to pay off the loan would continue and only the interest repayments would be affected. But this could represent a delay in payments totalling £6 million up until 2024, when bosses stated they would restore full payments and repay the deferred amount.

They stressed that the council would receive the full amount within the same 25-year agreed period and that they will try to increase repayments before 2024.

The council then recruited two consultants to support its decision-making – one financial expert and one attractions expert, to be paid for by the i360.

At the policy resources and growth committee meeting on December 6, the committee agreed to postpone a formal restructuring of the i360 loan for one year, to allow it time to continue building the business.

LDP attractions experts made positive predictions about the visitor numbers the i360 could achieve in time, while real estate advice group GVA told the council the i360 would be unlikely to be able to make sufficient repayments until 2022-23. So therefore the council agreed to defer £880,304.25 of the repayments due on December 31 2018.

Yesterday Mr Yates called on the Conservative and Green parties to “commit to resisting any further restructuring of the debt.

Earlier this month The Argus reported that the i360 had seen a 31 per cent fall in customers in its second year of trading, down from 503,000 to 344,853. Its revenue also fell from about £7.1 million to just over £6 million.

The company made an overall loss of more than £3.8million, compared to a loss of more than £2.7million the year before.

Bosses at the attraction pointed out that this figure includes loan repayments and business rates, plus the fact that the i360 tower depreciates in value by £1.2million a year.

Mr Yates described the i360 as a “missed opportunity” and said the party wanted to see the attraction linked to others in the Brighton seafront area.

He said: “To get cross attraction ticketing in place is an absolute must.

“We have 11 million visitors coming into the city each year, more if last weekend is anything to go by, so to make the most of our attractions makes absolute sense.”

Mr Yates suggested linking the i360 to other attractions on the seafront or creating new facilities in the area.

He also urged other political parties in the city to join them.

Mr Yates said: “My suggestion is to get behind the i360, not just in words but in actions.

“This includes having a political consensus with the Tories and Greens who saddled us up with this debt.

“We don’t want the i360 to be a political football any longer.”

Julia Barfield, chairwoman of the Brighton i360, said: “The Brighton i360 board appreciates the flexibility shown by its main lender, Brighton and Hove City Council, while we build the business.

“We’ve had an excellent start to the year and on many days have been ahead of visitor projections.

“As such, we are confident we will see an increase in visitor numbers this year which should set the company on a path towards meeting its long-term financial commitments.”