News, Politics

Motorpoint Arena and Ice Centre makes redundancies – but reports ‘record year’ at box office

By Joe Locker, Local Democracy Reporter

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The National Ice Centre and Motorpoint Arena has had a record year at the box office – despite the negative impacts to the business as a result of redundancies.

Chief Executive Martin Ingham said it has been a “year of contrasts” for the council-owned business, which is celebrating its 25th anniversary.

He said the centre, which is the region’s largest purpose-built indoor entertainment venue, had to make 19 redundancies in a bid to turn around its finances over the last year.

However, he emphasised it had been a “record year” at the box office, with sales helped along by six Peter Kay events and Nottingham Forest’s new netball fixtures.

“The best way to describe the year that has just finished is a year very much of contrasts,” he said, speaking at a Nottingham City Council Companies Governance Executive Committee meeting on Tuesday (April 1).

“We made a number of redundancies. That cost-cutting exercise enabled us to turn round the financial expectations of the year to the point where we are looking at a break-even/small loss for the year.

“We had a very strong box office, where we account for those booking fees and the point at which you sell tickets, and national merchandise had a very strong year.”

Companies House documents show the business, which files under the Nottingham Ice Centre, reported a profit after tax of £61,083 in the year up to March 31, 2024.

It reported a £71,000 loss the previous year.

The accounts for the latest financial year, which ended on March 31, have not yet been published.

Opened in 2000, the multi-purpose main arena has a capacity of 10,000 for concerts and is also home to the Nottingham Panthers ice hockey team.

A second ice rink offers public skating and other on-ice events.

During the Covid pandemic, the business was given a £7.4m loan by Nottingham City Council to keep it afloat.

This will be paid back in £600,000 sums beginning 2026/27.

Despite this, Mr Ingham said the rate of return for the Labour-led council “has been phenomenal”, having brought in an estimated £1bn to the city’s economy ever since it was set up on a £16m investment from the authority.

Current “headwinds” include the increased National Insurance contributions imposed by the Labour Government from April, as well as the increased living wage.

To help alleviate the costs, the business is now considering automating some of its roles.

“We are a very employee-heavy business,” Mr Ingham said.

“A lot of our costs are in staff delivering services to customers. The National Insurance changes are significant because we employ so many casual staff.

“Food and beverage inflation is significant, as is the economic impact of the cost of living, particularly ticketing and affordability. The prices of tickets continues to escalate exponentially, hopefully that will start to come to an end.

“How do we mitigate those costs? Well, one of the ways we can do that with catering is to look at ‘frictionless’ business by taking as many staff out of that transaction as possible and automating that wherever we can.

“That might be in the form of ‘e-bars’, where you see people pouring their own pints. A journey at the moment that takes five minutes will potentially take 15 seconds, and we are hoping that will have a massive impact.”

Of the redundancies, 19 were existing roles, while 10 vacancies have been removed.

“We are being more reticent now not to build in more permanent roles, so we have the flexibility in the future,” Mr Ingham added.