The owner of a dilapidated former Perth church faces paying Perth and Kinross Council around £400,000 to carry out necessary repair work, with the local authority’s patience on the issue rapidly running out.
A source for James Boyd, a director with Arengate Ltd, who owns St Paul’s Church, previously claimed he would arrange for work to begin this week and that this would include the trapping and culling of nesting pigeons and also that he would decontaminate the inside of the building.
However, there is no sign of any work having taken place this week.
Mr Boyd, who is based in Northern Ireland, has stated he would invest £1 million in the building if this was matched by the council, and has also said plans were afoot to provide external security at the site.
He had been served with an urgent repairs notice but came to a compromise with Isobel Butt, Perth and Kinross Council’s vacant property development officer, who stated that no action would be taken against Mr Boyd as long as he arranged for vital repair work to the building to start this week.
Underfire Mr Boyd, who failed to respond to phone calls from The Courier regarding the matter, has claimed he intends to refurbish the dilapidated St Paul’s Church into a café/heritage centre. However, he also states that he has contacted Scottish Heritage Lottery and Perth and Kinross Council for assistance with funding for his proposal but was left with “no guarantees.”
The businessman, who also runs Simple Marketing Global in Belfast, took over the building in June last year but at one stage looked set to sell it to an Islamist religious organisation.
The latest twist in the long-running saga arose when the council issued Arengate Ltd with an urgent repairs notice, which ordered the company to carry out emergency works on St Paul’s Church by June 1. If not, then the council would step in, complete any work themselves and bill Arengate for the repairs – understood to cost in the region of £400,000.
Perth and Kinross Council took this decision following an inspection of the building by structural engineers which resulted in a schedule of works being issued to Arengate in November last year.
Yesterday, a council spokesperson confirmed they had not received any communication from Mr Boyd regarding the repairs and that they are set to continue with plans to carry out the work themselves, if needed.
“The council has been advised by the owners of St Paul’s that work would commence this week,” she said.
“We are waiting to receive full details of what measures the owners are putting in place to address all of the specified urgent works.
“The council’s position hasn’t changed and we are proceeding with the procurement of the urgent works which we shall be carrying out in the event that they are not undertaken by the owners. If the owners undertake the works in the interim then the council will not proceed.”
Mr Boyd previously said he had spent £80,000 on St Paul’s Church, which included funding for erecting a ‘wrap-form’ of scaffolding, and he also claimed he had made it watertight and secure.
In addition, he also stressed he would fight the urgent repairs notice issued by the council.
“I have no duty to carry out repairs on St Paul’s Church through Scots law,” he had said.
“The building was derelict for at least 10 years before I took it over so I will fight this repairs notice every inch of the way.”
St Paul’s Church closed its doors in 1986 and has remained empty since.
