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Ms Hazel Blears (Salford): Will the hon. Gentleman give way?
Mr. Ainsworth: No, I will not.
Mr. Ainsworth: All right; I give way to the hon. Lady.
Ms Blears: Does the hon. Gentleman not accept that his constant denigration of the dome has a terrible effect on those children--hundreds of thousands of them--who are going to the dome to do the "our town story", as Salford children did last week? They are proud of their cities and their heritage. He should be ashamed of his constant denigration of those children's activities.
Mr. Ainsworth: If the hon. Lady had paid attention to any of the discussions that we have had on the dome in the past 18 months, she would have heard me being supportive of the project. It is not Conservative Members who have made the dome what it is today. It is not they who have enabled children to visit only two of the zones. It is not they who have given rise to children from Yorkshire being offered an 8 am slot for their visit to the dome, which would mean their getting up at 2 am. She should look at what is going on before criticising Conservative Members.
Last autumn's draw-down of the £50 million facility from the Millennium Commission is another prime example of appalling media relations. That £50 million had always been in the budget, but it had never been referred to, so, not surprisingly, commentators saw it as a new cash injection and that is how it was portrayed.
Similarly inept was the attempt to spin the emergency cash-flow boost in January as perfectly in line with expectations. Shortly after the opening night, I warned that the project might run into cash-flow difficulties in the near future and need an injection of funds, but not even I had expected that need to arise so soon. No one in their
right mind plans to receive an emergency cash injection to avoid insolvent trading. To have pretended otherwise was absurd.Incidentally, I have yet to meet anyone who favours giving more money to the project. Perhaps the Secretary of State has. If so, I will be delighted to hear who. I will also be delighted to hear what guarantee he can offer that the dome will not be back for more. He is silent on that, but I hope that when he answers he will offer some relevant remarks.
The media had just about had their fill of patronising and misleading claptrap when it was suddenly claimed that, instead of needing 12 million visitors to break even--the figure that had been in the public domain for about two years--the dome would need only 10 million visitors. I am certain that that miraculous change in the economics of the dome had nothing whatever to do with the fact that, at that time, the public were staying away in droves.
Dome watchers had worked out by mid-January that, as crisis followed crisis, there would be a need for a scapegoat. They had also worked out that under no circumstances would that scapegoat be a Minister.
Jennie Page, redoubtable and feisty as she is, is a public servant by instinct and training. She had possibly the worst job in Britain and she did it very well. It was made even worse by the constant interference from Ministers, which she found exasperating. To deliver the project on time and to budget by 31 December was no mean achievement. She deserved better than a public and acrimonious dismissal.
We are told that it was Lord Falconer himself who, on the day of Jennie Page's departure, personally telephoned a number of the sponsors to tell them about her replacement. The Secretary of State has written to me on the subject. He played no part in the shameful affair. He is exonerated, but I should be grateful if he confirmed that it is his understanding that Lord Falconer telephoned the sponsors on the day that Jennie Page left. If so, will he share with the House his understanding of what Lord Falconer said to the sponsors because there seems to have been some misunderstanding? They were left with the impression that the dome's new chief executive was to be the man who saved Disneyland Paris. That was Philippe Bourguignon, not P-Y Gerbeau. It was another masterly display of cack-handed spin, in which the Minister was personally involved.
I wish P-Y, as we must grow to know and to love him, very well. It is not his fault that his appointment prompted Le Monde to gloat:
- "A Frenchman, a garlic eater, a vulgar frog is to rescue the failure of what Tony Blair only 2 months ago called 'This extraordinary Testament to British creativity'".
Mr. Nick Hawkins (Surrey Heath): Does my hon. Friend agree that what the dome has become in the public mind and certainly in the media's mind is a testament to new Labour, the epitome, a paradigm--all spin and no substance?
Mr. Ainsworth: My hon. Friend is right. If he waits, I may dwell briefly on that theme, too.
Mr. Clive Efford (Eltham): Will the hon. Gentleman give way?
Mr. Ainsworth: I will not at the moment.
P-Y appears to have got off to a good start, helped by half-term and by the weather, although people do not have to pay £20 to go to the dome to watch a rugby international, however gratifying the result. He faces an unenviable task, hampered again by time--the project's enemy--and by money. He is also hampered by the content of the dome itself.
The original vision for the dome was noble and thoughtful: a symbol of Britain on the cusp of the new millennium, a celebration of our past. History has been air-brushed from the dome. The theme of time has become a mere memory. It was a chance to take stock of ourselves as a nation and to glimpse the future with the help of the best of our creative talent and cutting-edge technology, but the dome is not a symbol of Britain. It is a symbol of a trite, self-regarding and bossy Government who believe in nothing and have to their credit only a mounting pile of broken promises and malfunctioning zones, such as health, crime and rural areas. The Government have fashioned a dome in their own image, partly on purpose, partly by mistake.
When the creative director, Stephen Bayley, walked out on the project because he could not hack the daily intrusions by Ministers in a project that was meant to be above politics, the dome was consigned to whatever fate bureaucrats, long-suffering and competing sponsors and Ministers could incompetently contrive between them. The result is the noisy, brash, part dull, part sensational exhibition that we are discussing tonight.
Sure, people will go, and good luck to them. I hope that they have a great day. Sure, children will enjoy the day out. When did children ever not enjoy a day out?
Mr. Jim Dowd (Lord Commissioner to the Treasury): Often.
Mr. Ainsworth: The hon. Gentleman obviously leads a sad life. We took the children to Brighton at the weekend. They had a very good day out and I do not think that Brighton has had £400 million of lottery money. It does not take £400 million of lottery money to give children a good day out.
The staff at the dome are universally helpful. I am told that the show is good as well, but on the day I went--and paid for my ticket--I was told that the show that I wanted to see had been cancelled owing to a lack of visitors.
What do people say about value for money at the dome?
Mr. Roger Gale (North Thanet): The cost of the dome is continually presented as not being a charge on the taxpayer. It is not clear whom the Government think that £400 million of lottery money came from if not from the taxpayer by another means. Unlike the Government, my hon. Friend has paid some attention to tourism. Could he make a guesstimate of what £400 million might have done for the seaside heritage of Britain?
Mr. Ainsworth: My hon. Friend tempts me down a road that I do not wish to travel. The Government have
many times admitted that lottery money is public money. Obviously, £400 million could have done a great deal for our tourist areas. However, the British Tourist Authority anticipates that the dome will attract a significant number of visitors, although I doubt that the claim that it will attract £1 billion of extra spending is anywhere near the mark.People who go to the dome have a reasonable day. There is no doubt about that. However, do they think that the money spent on it was well spent? A handy website--www.DomeVote.co.uk--has been set up to enable those who have visited the dome to voice their opinions. The first question is, "Is the dome worth £758 million?" So far, 16 per cent. say yes and 78 per cent. say no. Some 48 per cent. rate the dome as a waste of money and 39 per cent. say that the queues are too long. The dome is not cutting it in terms of value for money.
As my hon. Friend the Member for Surrey Heath (Mr. Hawkins) said a few moments ago, the dome is an emblem of new Labour. It betrays a failure of vision. Worse, it betrays an inability to understand where politics should give way to art, design, science, architecture and history. It is not a triumph of spin over substance because it is not a triumph at all.
In the long run, what happens after the exhibition closes will be of far greater importance than the exhibition itself. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Henley (Mr. Heseltine) will confirm, Greenwich was chosen partly because of its location on the meridian line, but also because of the immense possibilities for regeneration in that part of London. It is worrying that Ministers have got off to such a delayed start in seeking bids for the site. It is worrying that nobody seems to have calculated the cost of decommissioning the exhibition. It is worrying that there appears to be a dispute with British Gas over the site. I am sure that the last thing that any of us wants is for the dome to stand idle for months after the exhibition closes at the end of the year. We want to get on with creating jobs and creating a development that will bring something of great value to the capital city and to the nation as a whole.
All that is for the future. For now, our message to Ministers is that they have done enough damage: leave P-Y to get on with the job, and leave the dome alone.
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