Can’t say I’m totally shocked. Most elements of any installation has a design life and in my experience it’s typically 20 years (give or take) so a major refurbishment of the things we wouldn’t really notice like fire alarms etc was always going to be on the cards around now. Couple that with Wasps not having the money to maintain it fully with all the debt they were trying to service meaning routine maintenance such as the things we do notice such as leaking roofs, shabby paintwork etc wasn’t getting done.
So basically a lot of the major costs were always going to be on the card’s around now simply because things were coming naturally to the end of their design life and clearly they were behind on general maintenance too, assume cash flow related.
The interesting thing for me is what if the council had have bailed them out of their financial mess. Wasp’s still wouldn’t have had the money to pay for these repairs so would they have been straight back to the council cap in hand again?
It’s pretty clear that there was no other option but for ACL to change hands and whoever was taking it on needed deep pockets.