Examination of Witnesses (Questions 214
- 219)
TUESDAY 23 OCTOBER 2001
RT HON
TESSA JOWELL,
MP, RT HON
RICHARD CABORN,
MP AND PHILIPPA
DREW
Chairman
214. Secretary of State, Minister, I would like
to welcome you here for both of your first appearances before
this Select Committee. I know the Secretary of State has gone
to some trouble to make herself available today and we much appreciate
that. I understand that you would like to make a brief opening
statement before we begin, and you are very welcome to do so.
(Tessa Jowell) Chairman, thank you very
much indeed for that. I would indeed like briefly to address the
Committee by way of introduction, and in doing so introduce my
two colleagues: Richard Caborn, Minister for Sport, on my left,
and Philippa Drew, who has overall responsibility for sports policy
in my department. I am delighted that this is my first appearance
before the Select Committee and hope that in the time ahead we
will enjoy a constructive dialogue, improving the delivery of
the Government's agenda for Culture, Media and Sport. The UK has
a strong track record in staging world-class sports events, both
one-off events such as the Modern Pentathlon World Championships
earlier this year as well as regular annual spectaculars such
as Wimbledon, The Open, Henley and the Six Nations Championship.
I am keen that all events which the Government is involved in
are of good quality and good standing to make sports governing
bodies pleased that they have chosen to come to the UK. It is
very much in this spirit that we are willing and taking practical
steps to ensure the success of the Commonwealth Games next year.
When Richard and I were appointed, as Minister for Sport and Secretary
of State respectively, in June, one of the key issues we had to
resolve was the staging of the 2005 World Athletics Championships.
It was very clear to us from the earliest briefing that this was
a project in some difficulty. Sport England's Lottery Panel then
expressed doubts about the Lee Valley Regional Park Authority's
application for Lottery funding on 18 June. I welcomed Sport England's
decision, which I informed the IAAF of before it was announced,
to ask Patrick Carter to review the whole project, and you will
be aware that Patrick Carter had just recently concluded a review
of the budget and state of readiness for the Commonwealth Games.
As you know, his report submitted to me at the end of August concluded
that the level of risk facing the project had reached such a stage
as to make it unsustainable. Having discussed his conclusions
in detail with Sport England, I had to decide whether to invest
significant amounts of new money in the project to make it sustainable
or whether to look to alternatives. Patrick Carter was clearly
of the view that even with significant additional funding the
Picketts Lock project still faced the very real prospect of being
a substandard event due to transport, infrastructure and athlete
accommodation difficulties. I was not willing to see the United
Kingdom, almost wilfully, proceed to stage a substandard event.
I concluded that it would not be right for Sport England to be
solely responsible for ending the project by declining the Park
Authorities lottery application. I therefore agreed, in the light
of Patrick Carter's Report, and Sport England's advice that the
project should not proceed and that I should be the one to explain
to UK Athletics and to discuss options with them before approaching
the IAAF. All this, as you will be aware, was conducted in a very
tight time frame. Similarly, I regarded it as important that I
should explain the rationale directly to the Picketts Lock Project
Team. It was clear from Patrick Carter's review that there was
no alternative for Picketts Lock in London for staging the World
Athletics Championships. While it would have been open to Government
at that stage to abandon the staging of the Championships our
preference was to offer the IAAF an acceptable substitute, and
this we have done in the form of the Don Valley Stadium for the
Championships and offering a London venue for the IAAF Congress
that takes place at the same time. I will shortly confirm this
offer in writing, once I have had the opportunity to discuss the
terms of my letter with UK Athletics. We will consider next steps,
including whether to enter a competitive process, if it is the
IAAF's decision, once we have received their reply to my letter,
which makes it clear that Sheffield is on the table as an alternative
offer. I am well aware that the decision that we took has been
unpopular in some sporting circles, but I am absolutely convinced
that it was the right and the only decision to take. I am equally
conscious that there are a number of lessons to be learned from
having to take this decision and earlier decisions also on a financial
package to ensure the vulnerability of the Commonwealth Games.
Some of these lessons have already been spelt out in this Committee's
previous reports but I am well aware that the Government needs
to look at this issue across the piece, not just from a sports
perspective, and I have therefore asked the Prime Minister to
commission a review of major events policy from the Performance
and Innovation Unit (PIU) which can study recent events and compare
this with the best practice overseas. The Prime Minister has agreed
to my request and the PIU will scope the extent of the review
in the next few weeks and, of course, an announcement to Parliament
will be made at that time of the details of the review. Finally,
Mr Chairman, let me just say this, Richard Caborn and I have certainly
examined how we got to a point where this was the only decision
to be taken in relation to the National Athletics Stadium. I think
we also have to accept, having been appointed on 8 June, that
we are where we are. Our focus, rather than picking over the coals
of what might and might not have happened in the past, is to address
the way in which we will deliver our commitments to sport in this
country for the future.
Michael Fabricant
215. The President of the IAAF offered the athletics
games to London, what makes you think, Secretary of State, it
is going to be remotely interested in Don Valley?
(Tessa Jowell) I accept that the games were offered
to London. It became clear, as a result of Patrick Carter's inquiry,
commissioned by me and Sport England, that London could not be
delivered to the standard that the IAAF had a right to expect.
We looked, before reaching the conclusion that Sheffield was the
only feasible alternative, at other London possibilities, indeed,
they had been pretty exhaustively examined at the point at which
Picketts Lock emerged as the best London option at the time the
initial bid was made. I informed the IAAF about my intention to
Commission a review with Sport England, just before it was announced,
on either 1 or 2 July, I spoke to the Chief Executive of the IAAF.
It was my sense, and I would not in any way hold the IAAF to this,
that the possibility of a non-London option was not one on which
the door was firmly closed.
216. Why was Crystal Palace ruled out?
(Tessa Jowell) Crystal Palace was ruled out on very
much the same grounds that Picketts Lock proved to be unfeasible
and the inadequacies of the transport infrastructure, transporting
40,000 people at the start of every day and taking them away at
the end of everyday. My constituency adjoins Crystal Palace Park
and I know well what the problems with transport in that part
of the South London are. Secondly, there was also what became
even more pressing, the compound problem of the athletes' accommodation,
which was the second new reason, post the Carter Inquiry, that
made Picketts Lock an implausible option. As I understand it,
there is no other suitable student accommodation offering the
number of bed spaces any closer to Crystal Palace than Hatfield
is to Picketts Lock. One of the reasons for ruling out Picketts
Lock was the difficulty of athletes negotiating that 19 mile journey
with the associated problems with transport. The short answer
to your question is that the problems in relation to Crystal Palace
were as great, if not, in some respects, greater. The existing
stadium, in the Carter team's judgment, would have had to be demolished.
217. Can I now move now to decision-making processes
within your Department, which I can say to you were made before
you were appointed? John Greenway, one of our colleagues, has
been very helpful in giving me some correspondence that he had
with your predecessor Chris Smith. In a letter on 19 January,
which is only nine months ago, Chris Smith was very, very sure
that the decision had been made, which was correct, to move to
Picketts Lock. He goes on to say,"WNSL's announcement fully
vindicated the decision I took on December 1999 to remove athletics
from the Wembley Project and the subsequent decision by UK Athletics
to opt for Lee Valley as the venue for the 2005 World Athletic
Championships". You will probably have seen this letter,
or at least been aware of its contents. Have you since you have
been appointed as Secretary of State made any investigation in
your own Department as to what advice the officials gave the previous
Secretary of State, only nine months ago, as I said, to give him
such certainty that that was the right decision, when nine months
on we know that decision was completely wrong?
(Tessa Jowell) If I can begin by saying, I think that
from my point of view what is important now is to focus on the
lessons learned from the past to be applied in the future in order
that we avoid the difficulties that have arisen with this project
in the future. I have not seen the correspondence between John
Greenway and Chris Smith, I am very happy to study it and to provide
a further submission to you in the light of that should you wish
me to do so. I think that what is also important is it is clear
to me that Picketts Lock became unviable because of two new events,
first of all, the fact that the promised upgrading of the transport
link did has not proceed and therefore would not have been delivered
in time.
218. When was that decision made, was that after
the nine months ago?
(Tessa Jowell) No. The Strategic Rail Authority, as
I am sure you will be aware, re-prioritised a number of their
investment projects post Hatfield with projects which were being
justified on the grounds of safety taking precedent over those
taken on the grounds of capacity, and this is a project taken
on the grounds of capacity. I am reminded that the Strategic Rail
Authority wrote to Enfield, the responsible local authority, on
14 August this year informing them of two things, first of all
that they could deliver an extra station but it would not deliver
the necessary capacity for the Championships and that they recognise
upgrades for increasing capacity as a priority but that programme
could not be delivered before 2005. Having been briefed on the
sort of alternatives that were being offered to cope with the
lack of rail infrastructure I concluded that they were inadequate.
Chairman
219. Secretary of State, back in your introductory
remarks you said, "we do not want to pick over what happened
in the past, we want to learn lessons from it". That is very
fair. In the case of Picketts Lock—I do not know what the
view of the Committee as a whole will come to when we draft our
report—as far as I am concerned I think you made the right
decision. It was a decision made as a result of an external report
by Mr Carter. Mr Fabricant has drawn attention to the reaction
of the Secretary of State, your predecessor, to the Report that
we made, with excellent advice from our then colleague Mr Faber,
but it was the Committee as a whole which did it, in which we
recommended Wembley with a platform. Mr Brooking this morning
has confirmed that that was the right recommendation and we could
have gone ahead on that basis. Yet when we published that Report
it had scarcely had time to get round to your Department before
the then-Secretary of State had issued a statement in the most
derogatory terms rejecting our Report. The reason I am doing this
is not to mull over the past but so that you can clarify whether
you rejected our report on internal advice from the Department—because
if so I think it is very important to find out who gave that advice,
since it was clearly very bad advice—or that it was not
so advised but it was the then-Secretary of State's own personal
decision. I think it is very important for us to know that?
(Tessa Jowell) If I can just start with where I picked
this up from and then we can, perhaps, look at how that takes
us back in time. What I was concerned about with Picketts Lock
was, is this project deliverable, is it affordable and have we
contained all of the containable risks? I have to say that when
I was first briefed on it and when my right honourable friend,
the Minister of Sport, was first briefed on it we were both extremely
alarmed. I was fully aware that we had a substantial commitment
to the athletics community in the country and to the IAAF to host
these Championships. I did not feel that it was right simply at
that point to say, "okay, we are going to draw a double line
under this", but to commission a robust assessment. I had
very quickly developed a very high regard for Patrick Carter and
his team, having studied very closely the work they had done on
the Commonwealth Games, he understood the nature of sporting projects,
particularly those that have, perhaps, an overly ambiguous relationship
with Government, which was why we involved him in this. That was
how I moved it forward. I think all of these decisions and all
of these judgments are on the basis of a continuum of where the
risk sits. I was risk adverse in relation to this project and
I was quite clear that it would proceed only on the basis that
we were certain that it was going to work and that we were not
going to find ourselves, as we had done with the Commonwealth
Games, almost right up to the event, faced with having to find
a lot more public money in order to bail it out, because every
million pounds that is preempted in that way is one million pounds
that is not going into grass roots sport. On the basis on which
my predecessor took the decision I do not know what was in his
mind and I was obviously not party to, nor have I seen, notes
of the discussions that led him to that conclusion. He reached
a decision which I am quite, quite sure he considered at the right
time, having taken advice, was the right judgment. I was looking
at this project some months on and reached a different conclusion,
not least because a number of circumstances had changed.
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