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Mr. Tim Yeo (South Suffolk): I am delighted that the House is debating this timely and comprehensive report. It has been a high-quality debate. There is much expertise about sporting matters in the House and much of it has been on display. I pay particular tribute to the speeches of the two former Ministers for Sport, the hon. Members for Vauxhall (Kate Hoey) and for West Ham (Mr. Banks). Even though they were not always in harmony, they made powerful contributions. The hon. Lady was also very frank.

I enjoyed the contribution of the hon. Member for Sittingbourne and Sheppey (Mr. Wyatt) although I much regret the news that he brought to the House about the third consecutive Oxford victory this afternoon. Looking at him, I find it difficult to believe that it was only 20 years since he represented the university. However, I consulted "Dod's Parliamentary Companion" and I discovered that he was a postgraduate student and already in his 30s at that time.

I also pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Taunton (Mr. Flook), who is one of the newer members of the Select Committee on Culture, Media and Sport. He made a thoughtful speech. In particular, however, I congratulate the Committee's Chairman, the right hon. Member for Manchester, Gorton (Mr. Kaufman), who has led the Committee for four and a half years. It has produced a series of remarkable high-quality reports. Although I have had a long-term lay interest in the subject, I come fairly new to the issues and I have read the reports with great interest and found real insights into the sporting and broadcasting worlds.

I welcome the Minister for Sport to the debate. I am sorry that the Secretary of State did not stay for the remainder of the debate, but that is a creeping case of Byers syndrome in which a Secretary of State responsible for a Government policy attends part of the debate but does not wait for its conclusion. After all, the Secretary of State's decision 10 weeks ago put the final nail in the coffin of London's bid for the world athletics championships, the latest in a series of Government- sponsored sporting disasters. Labour's attempts to bring a major sporting event to Britain have been wrecked by a total lack of vision, an abject failure of leadership, grossly incompetent management and a pattern of broken promises.

In the past four years, Ministers have made Britain a laughing stock in international sporting circles. They have denied sports fans here the chance to see top athletes perform on British soil and they have effectively thrown away Britain's chances of hosting a major international event in the foreseeable future.

London's bid to host the world athletics championships degenerated steadily from the start in January 1999, although all appeared to go well to begin with. Launching the new Wembley stadium concept in July 1999, the right hon. Member for Islington, South and Finsbury (Mr. Smith), who has apologised for his absence from the Chamber for the winding-up speeches, said that the new stadium

"will be a magnificent venue for athletics as well as for football".

I listened in vain to his speech today for any explanation of why only four months later he changed his mind about

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something that he had thought so splendid in July 1999. His views had changed to such an extent that he said:

"the stadium as designed—or in any similar configuration—cannot readily provide the central venue for an Olympic games bid for London. Furthermore, it seems unlikely that it could provide an appropriate venue for the world athletics championships."

That decision was rightly condemned in an earlier report of the Select Committee.

Andy Burnham rose—

Mr. Yeo: I have little time, so I regret that I cannot give way.

The Secretary of State has suddenly left London without a venue for the championships, but the Government's commitment had been confirmed at the very highest level. In a letter of January 2000, the Prime Minister said:

"The Government is pleased to give its full support to this bid by UK Athletics to bring the World Athletics Championships to Britain . . . World Class facilities will be ready, our athletes will be ready and our people will be ready."

I draw the attention of the Minister for Sport to the particularly significant final sentence which reads:

"We look forward to welcoming the world athletics family to London in 2005."

Perhaps the Minister will do his homework before he intervenes again.

By the time the IAAF council accepted London's bid, Picketts Lock had been identified as the venue for the championships. The bid was accepted on the condition that UK Athletics could demonstrate that clear progress had been made on the stadium by October this year. No Minister, then or subsequently, can have been in any doubt about what was needed if the Prime Minister's promises were to be honoured. Alas, no Minister, then or subsequently, did what was needed to honour those promises.

Despite Ministers' failure to act, however, they did not lose confidence. On 21 March 2001, the former Secretary of State said:

"I am absolutely confident that we are properly on track."

The Prime Minister himself acknowledged that the Government had a responsibility for sporting decisions. When questioned in the House about the Wembley project, he said:

"I regret the fact that it has fallen through, and we must now sit down and work out a way through it so that we have a proper national stadium."—[Official Report, 2 May 2001; Vol. 367, c. 841.]

It is worth noting that seven months later the current Secretary of State still seems to be dithering about the national stadium. The Government originally decided that there should be a national stadium at Wembley with athletics; then they decided that there should be a national stadium at Wembley without athletics; now they simply do not know whether there should be a national stadium at all, whether it should be at Wembley or whether athletics should be part of it. I hope that the Minister for Sport will shed a little light on the matter, because the only decision that the present set of Ministers has taken is not to publish the advice that they have received from

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Patrick Carter, who the hon. Member for Vauxhall has established actually exists. However, like her, I have not met him.

On the world athletics championships, this year's Labour party election manifesto stated:

"We will maintain the elite funding we put in place for individual athletics with a first-class athletics stadium for the World Athletics Championships in 2005."

Despite that, doubts about Picketts Lock grew, and after the general election the Prime Minister sacked all the Ministers who had been trying to carry out his policy and to do his bidding. The new team faced a situation which, if it called for anything, required prompt and decisive action. However, the Secretary of State dithered. Instead of making a decision, she appointed a consultant—the ubiquitous Mr. Carter.

At this point, Sheffield suddenly appeared on the scene. The city has featured prominently in the Government's sporting policies before. In December 1997, the Government announced that a UK Sports Institute would be built there and, in the Government's mind, that project came to fruition splendidly. Their annual report for 2000 stated:

"this year saw the opening of the UK Sports Institute, providing world-class facilities, coaching and support in Sheffield".

Kate Hoey: I wish to place on record the fact that the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, of which I was a member, and the former Secretary of State asked for a formal change to be made to that document. When the draft came round, they saw that it was wrong. The fact that it was not corrected was not down to what I described as the dysfunctional DCMS but to someone, somewhere who produces these wonderful Government reports.

Mr. Yeo: I am grateful to the hon. Lady for making that clear. The fact that the spanking new facilities did not actually exist and were a figment of the imagination of the report's authors represents one of the most remarkable examples of unjoined-up government. The authors were not even aware that an announcement was made in 1999 to say that the Sports Institute would be situated in London. The only explanation for how the report turned from fact to fiction on sporting matters must be that the Prime Minister wrote the introduction.

The Prime Minister is known for his flights of fancy when it comes to sport. He claimed that, as a youngster, he sat watching Jackie Milburn at St James' park. The seats turned out not to exist and he was watching a player who had long ceased to play for Newcastle by the time the Prime Minister was a school boy.

While the Government waited for the consultant's report, the Minister for Sport went to Edmonton and to this year's world athletics championships. According to The Standard, he was still quite keen on London as a venue for 2005. On 8 August, it reported that he reaffirmed the Government's commitment to staging the world athletics championships in London in 2005. The article reported him as saying:

"This is a commitment from the Prime Minister down and is not considered negotiable. We will meet all the deadlines set by the IAAF."

Four weeks after that report, Patrick Carter's recommendations were delivered to Ministers. Five more damaging weeks of dither followed before the Secretary

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of State finally bit the bullet and told UK Athletics that Picketts Lock was not viable, reneging on every promise given by the Government, from the Prime Minister down.

However, the curtain on this ministerial farce had still not come down. One act remained to be played. Ignoring the fact that the IAAF had awarded the world athletics championships to London, a city, and not to Britain, a country, Ministers took up the cause of Sheffield. A good case could have been made for that city had it been submitted at the proper time, two and a half years ago. Sheffield has a fine sporting tradition. The Don Valley stadium could have been helped to stage the championships, but the last-ditch attempt to divert attention away from the disastrous handling by Ministers of the London bid merely dragged Sheffield humiliatingly into the fiasco.

Among those who were not impressed was the president of the IAAF. The Select Committee Chairman, the right hon. Member for Manchester, Gorton, quoted the Financial Times. The president of the IAAF wrote to his council members after he met the Secretary of State and the Minister for Sport on 5 October. He said:

"the IAAF had received numerous guarantees that London would host these championships and that the IAAF Council granted the event to the city—even though there was no actual stadium—in good faith. Since the first news that the rebuilt Wembley Stadium would become Britain's 'new' National Stadium capable of hosting major events in 1996, the IAAF had been approached to host its World Championships in Wembley in 2001, then Wembley in 2003 and 2005, then Twickenham or Crystal Palace in 2005, then Pickett's Lock in 2005 and, finally, Sheffield in 2005.


I declared that this was not acceptable and explained that if London formally withdrew before the deadline of 26 November, the IAAF had no alternative but to open the bidding process again."

That letter was circulated to the IAAF council on 12 October, a week after the president's meeting with Ministers.

The extent to which Ministers were living in a fantasy world is demonstrated in the Secretary of State's press release, issued on 4 October. At the time of her meeting, she said that Labour had

"acted decisively to put in place a first class alternative in Sheffield, which will deliver the Games . . . as a long term legacy for athletics in the UK."

The Minister for Sport told the Select Committee on 23 October:

"Can I say that what was said by the Secretary General"

of the IAAF

"when we came out was very important, bearing in mind I was with my officials. He said, he wanted the best for the Games and he wanted the best for London. We believe we have actually delivered that for the IAAF."

The effects of the U-turn by Ministers are far-reaching. The International Olympic Committee president, Jacques Rogge, said:

"Of course the Picketts Lock situation was a very serious one. A country not being able to fulfil its pledge to host a major competition is not a trivial matter."

Simon Clegg, the chief executive of the British Olympic Association, said:

"we will have deprived British athletes of competing in the world's third largest sporting event on home soil with all the competitive advantages that this entails . . . we will have lost the opportunity of demonstrating to the world that we have the ability to stage major sporting events. Coming so soon after the Wembley fiasco it further damages our . . . sporting reputation".

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No new facts emerged to justify the U-turn. Every problem that arose from London's bid was well known to Ministers for many months before they made their decision. Their actions in relation to London and their absurd last-minute attempt to switch the championships to Sheffield—an attempt abandoned ignominiously less than two months after it was unveiled—could hardly have done more damage to Britain's reputation than if they had been designed to do so.

The report contains many recommendations that the Opposition strongly support and others that deserve further discussion, but it contains nothing to alter the basic conclusion that Labour has let down British sports fans and British sportsmen and women. No matter what excuses Ministers concoct to explain their actions, it will take years for our reputation to recover.

I recognise the Minister's predicament. He is the man entrusted by the Prime Minister with the task of persuading this country and the world that the Government are interested in sport and that they bring some passion to the pitch. Alas, he is also the Minister for Sport who went to Wimbledon to announce that he did not like tennis. If the Government accept the Select Committee's recommendation for a dedicated Minister for events, I invite him, in the interests of the country, not to apply for the job. I urge him to abandon his usual bluster and admit that the blame for the series of disasters lies fairly and squarely with the Government.

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