The final part of the scaffolding was taken down from the South side of church towards the end of June marking the completion of the first stage of the urgent repairs to the roof which initially commenced in March 2020.

The contractor Graham Bailey, ably assisted by his son have done a wonderful job for which we are very grateful.

Thank you to all of you for your patience whilst the work was being undertaken. It did last much longer than anticipated due to the pandemic.

The initial urgent repair work all came in on budget with the addition of new guttering to the north side of church that we were advised to put up by the architect.

There was additional urgent repair works required to the south side of the roof undertaken in 2021. Whilst these attracted extra costs they also came in on budget. This work, which would have formed part of the next stage of the roof repair, had to be brought forward in time due to the very poor state of the roof found at the site inspection with our architect in October 2020.

A summary of the finances of the work is shown below:

Donations to end of June plus gift aid claimed £40,729.21

Draw surplus from 2019/2020 and 2020/2021 £ 4,794.00

Harrogate Historic Churches 2020 & 2021 £ 2,000.00

VAT reclaimed under the LPWS £ 10,507.69

TOTAL INCOME £ 58,030.90

Contractor costs £39,129.60

Scaffolding £22,320.00

Rentokil (removal of the bird nesting detritus) £ 2,196.55

TOTAL COSTS £63,646.15

Shortfall £ 5,615.25

The architect’s fees are still to come in and should be around £2,000.00.

Due to the urgent nature of the repairs found last October the PCC made the difficult decision to go ahead sooner rather than later with these works and accepted the generous offer of a loan from St Leonards Church PCC of £10,000, which will be paid back over a period of two years, to cover the shortfall.

The Rejuven8 St John’s4 all team will now start planning to raise the funds to recover the shortfall and for the next stage