P.101 - ON THE LINE: CRYSTAL
PALACE - 9 p.m. 10 June
2002
Ed: every effort has been made to produce an accurate version of the report as it was transmitted on BBC Radio Five Live but the Crystal Palace Campaign takes no responsibility for any errors that occur nor for the content of the report and discussion.
On The Line tonight investigates why a once proud sports facility has fallen on hard times in a squabble over funding.
Presenter
For more than thirty years the National Sports Centre at Crystal Palace has been the spiritual home of athletics in England...
SFX…music...
Alan Pascoe
There is no other venue that has anything of the emotion, colour and feel ..
Mike Yates
Like football is for Wembley, Crystal Palace is where you dreamed of running..
David Sparkes
In its day it was a fantastic facility …
Presenter
Today its facilities are in such a state of dilapidation that it's swimming pool couldn't host a national championship .. and next year's athletics Grand Prix could be the last.
Alan Pascoe
I see Britain losing the one athletics venue that it has got and this is against the background of the whole Wembley/ Picket's Lock fiasco.
Presenter
I reveal how those responsible for the Crystal Palace National Sports Centre have failed to reach agreement on what to do with it, how to pay for it and why a once state-of-the art sports facility is now heading for the rocks.
SFX… end music fade up hall sfx…
Mike Winch
It has some heaters but you might notice they're all a bit battered because we actually hit them with shots because this place is too low for us to throw them and if you look over here you can see all these wires hanging down from the ceiling ...
Presenter
Mike Winch is the England team's senior coach at this summer's Commonwealth Games.
Mike Winch
...They can't putt the shot properly in here, they have to aim their shots between the rafters and the heaters and the lights and the bits of wires dangling down.
Presenter
He's showing me around the Crystal Palace indoor athletics facility . He says its the only one in south London.
Mike Winch
…the pole-vaulters are on this side , the long jump is down there and the runners down here I really don't know how we have managed to do it to be quite honest.
Presenter
Nor do I. Its narrow, long and dingy. Its floor covering a sort of scab reminiscent of those beer and fag ridden affairs in cheap after-hours clubs. It stinks too..
SFX… footsteps…
Step out into the daylight and it does not get much better. Walk through an alley bounded on one side by an equally distressed hard-court sports pitch and on the other by a bar and you come to the athletics stadium. From a distance it doesn't look too bad. Close up, it's a different story.
Mike Winch
Originally it was a world-class facility and a world-class centre for athletics and since its inception it has been on a continuous and steady down run.
Presenter
On August 23rd the world's top athletes will be lining up for the IAAF grand prix on this track.
Mike Winch
Basically it is extremely dirty, it's covered in sand and in places is lifting off its base surface. It's worn down quite considerably and certainly it needs totally replacement.
Presenter
So, I mean, from being one of the first places to have one of these things it is rather sad to look at in the state it's got to.
Mike Winch
It is totally absurd. They are still going to hold the Grand Prix Meeting here in the summer and they are going to have world-class athletes competing on this - but basically, I should think that they think this is a joke.
Presenter
Athletics here dates from Victorian times but in 1964 the Sports Council developed the site as one of its four national sports centres. The government funded a state-of- the-art swimming pool, sports hall, tennis courts and athletics track. The Greater London Council paid the running costs. Although a mutli-sports centre, it quickly became adopted as the home of British athletics. Alan Pascoe has a long association with the place both as a performer now as top promoter.
Alan Pascoe
It was the social hub, it was the training hub , it was everything that athletics represented in that whole 1960's/70's/early 80's era... it is the heritage of athletics in this country now. There is no other venue that has anything of the emotion, the colour or the feel. It just has all those wonderful connotations, stories good/bad stories. The Cram-Ovett in 1983 was the classic 1500 meter race…
SFX… race commentary
Steve Cram
I had won the world championships in Helsinki a few weeks earlier and Steve Ovett had broken the world record for the 1500 it was billed as the race to decide who was number one at the time. It was the kicker against the strong man, everybody took their sides and who they thought was going to win...
SFX….race conclusion.. (David Coleman commentating)
Presenter
Watching that night was Matthew Yates.
Matthew Yates
That was the place that made me want to be a runner… the Friday night, if we were not there, we were watching it on the BBC. The whole day began at 3 o'clock, straight after school and you would be taken there by your parents and you would see people from your athletics club and it was one big day out, a bit like Wimbledon for tennis Crystal Palace is for athletics.
Presenter
As things stand it's unlikely future generations will be inspired to become an international 1500 meter runner, like Matthew Yates went on to be. Since 1994 Crystal Palace has found itself in a sort of policy black hole. Like Wembley, it's been promised a 21st century make over but in a decade of wrangling nothing has materialised.
SFX…pool FX...
David Sparkes
I came into my job in 1994 and Crystal Palace refurbishment was on the agenda then .. we will be going to Athens in 2004 and I question if we will have a solution then...
Presenter
David Sparkes is the chief executive of the other great sport with a considerable investment in the place, swimming.
David Sparkes
This has been on my desk now as a problem. Since then we have made little or no progress. I have seen designs, I have been consulted, we have been asked what we think should be done with it and we have told them but we don't seem to be any further forward as of today.
Presenter
The pool takes up half of the indoor sports hall, a drab piece of sixties concrete and glass chic that hasn't stood the test of time, aesthetically or otherwise.
SFX… walking to pool, in hall…
He gave me a guided tour of the problems.
David Sparkes
What we are looking at is a typical 1960's building. We are looking at a pigeon lofting up there nearby the roof, which are common visitors to the building. You are looking at a very tired building that has not really been properly maintained as you can see... and perhaps the best way to describe it, to me, is this is the sort of building I would expect to see in a third world country really.
Presenter
And if the International Swimming Association, FINA, were to come here and look at this for a potential site for the world championships what would they say ?
David Sparkes
They would say NO - in very simple terms. The pool itself is too narrow . It should be 25 meters wide and as you can see it's a very narrow pool, there are not sufficient seats, the equipment that is around here is in a fairly poor condition as you can see. Of course, generally the fact that you're looking at a glass wall does not create a competition environment what you really want to be doing is looking at a bank of spectators, so that it's spectators on both sides of the pool.
Presenter
There is now an additional urgency because in March 2004, less than two years from now, the lease is up. If Sport England don't sign a new lease, then the cost of running it in future will fall on the London Borough of Bromley who inherited it when the Greater London Council was abolished in 1986. I asked Brigid Simmons, currently chairman of the lottery panel, which is an arm of Sport England, if they would sign or turn their back on the facility.
Brigid Simmons
What we would like to do is set up a sort of multi-agency think tank and explore all the options. We,re open... we have no fixed view on this.
Presenter
The abolition of the GLC was the first step on the downward slope for the National Sports Centre . Its new landlord, Bromley Council,. had a fraction of the resources of the GLC. Effectively a financial safety net disappeared. Dave Moorcroft of UK Athletics explains the significance.
David Moorcroft
When you are dealing with big local authorities like Birmingham or relatively wealthy organisations like universities then I guess a lot of the revenue issues are more easy to solve. I imagine with Crystal Palace it is that Bromley would feel that they haven't got a bottomless pit of money and there is not a large London entity that has a significant amount of wealth that could invest in the project.
SFX…lottery draw sounds..
Presenter
The lottery may have enriched sport but the sudden windfall also created problems. The possibilities which have opened up have been accompanied by a failure to hammer out a clear strategy for elite sports. Wembley, and the Commonwealth Games have swallowed up over £280million, a huge portion of the cash available to top class sport. Changes in government, three Secretaries of State and four Sports Ministers in six years, have all impacted on Crystal Palace.
David Moorcroft
By evolution the centre is different to what it was and trying to come to terms with that difference and fund that difference and create the right relationships is one of the difficulties that Sport England and Bromley have.
Presenter
Back in 1995 it seemed simple enough, at least to Robbie Stoakes, director of Leisure at Bromley. The council had received a letter from the Sports Minister at the time, Ian Sproat. The government had just published a policy document called 'Raising the Game' which saw Crystal Palace at the heart of a network of elite sporting facilities in the south of England.
Robbie Stoakes
They saw the prospect of the Lottery as a way of securing funding to do that. But because Sport England could not give themselves lottery money, they asked if Bromley, as the landlord, could take the lead in producing a study.
Presenter
All very straight forward then. The Minister of Sport wants us to apply to the lottery, quite an ally. Even better, the Sports Council who distribute the sports element of the lottery largesse paid Bromley £50,000 to help develop the project, which involved refurbishing the track, stadium and outdoor facilities and knocking down the sports hall and replacing it with a modern structure suited to modern sport.
Robbie Stoakes
A week after Sport England approved the scheme and we had meetings with the Minister of Sport on the scheme, a few weeks after the outline approval, the same minister with a different hat on, the Heritage Minister hat, listed the indoor arena.
Presenter
Tony Banks, had replaced Ian Sproat as Minister for both sport and listed buildings. Bromley say the decision to list a 'dinosaur of an indoor sports hall' brought 18 months of development crashing down, and scuppered the deal…It was a blow from which the National Sports Centre has visibly not recovered.
Robbie Stoakes
What that meant was that we had to change the scheme to fit around the fact that the building was now listed.
Presenter
What was the reaction here when that happened? Informally, at the water cooler as it were , what were you all saying?
Robbie Stoakes
We just thought it was incredible that one part of government could be encouraging us along one path , that another part of government could be actually frustrating that and that the two agencies that were making those decisions were under the direction of the same person, albeit with different hats on ..
SFX…pool…
David Sparkes
I must admit I was confused at that because I always thought that the main architectural feature in fact the central gangway we just walked down. but apparently that wasn't why they listed it. I understand the reason that they listed it was because of the glass wall. And that in its day that glass wall which does not look too bright now, does it, that was the feature that they liked. I also understand that they quite like the diving facilities and they think those make an architectural statement.
Presenter
Well they might make an architectural statement but the diving boards are not high enough and not wide enough which gives the swimmers a bit of a problem…
Standing outside the sports hall here at Crystal Palace and what you see is a predominately dirty grey square concrete structure broken up by narrow arched glass slats. It's a crude building with all the subtlety of Stalinist hotel. Its historical significance is that it was the first purpose-built multi-sports hall in this country. Its significance today is that it is an obstacle to be negotiated before the site can be developed. While everyone else I spoke with believes it was the listing which killed off the scheme , Brigid Simmons at Sport England doesn't agree.
Bridgid Simmons
I think £40m was a huge amount of money to be spent on that particular building, having assessed the need , the value for money which is what every lottery application has to go through. I think the listing was incidental, the listing definitely adds to the cost as we go forward but I do not think it was material when the application came in in the first place.
Presenter
Which is odd because the next thing that Sport England did was to write a cheque to Bromley for a quarter of a million pounds to develop another plan for the site working around the listed building.
If you weren't supportive of the £42 million scheme submitted in '98 and torpedoed by the listing of the building why did you then persist with another lottery bid in 1999?
Bridget Simmons
Well Bromley were in the process of refurbishing the whole park. They had a separate application that was going through I think to the national heritage memorial fund for doing work on the garden side and it was part of a whole re-look at Crystal Palace and what could be done and we were very happy to be part of that. It came forward with this £32million bid, and at the end of the day we found it was going to be very difficult to justify that level of funding without greater strategic justification. And we went for this in-principle support which wasn't a commitment of funds but that we believed there was a case for the plans and designs to be fleshed out which was what happened
Presenter
Robbie Stoakes, who was in charge of the Bromley end, remembers it very differently.
Robbie Stoakes
The brief was agreed with Sport England, the direction of the study was managed jointly with Sport England and not only did they approve the outline scheme of £42 million , they gave us a funding contribution to the development of the design.
Presenter
But in July 1999, the lottery committee, an arm of Sport England, the very organisation that had spent thousands of pounds developing the plan, who had invited Bromley to apply and who had promised the project, quotes, 'a fair wind', rejected the scheme.
Robbie Stoakes
We were just totally astonished because, as I said earlier, we only submitted the application after we got the green light from the Chief Executive of Sport England to say that they were happy with the mix , the profile of the facilities. The £35 million scheme, while that sounds big and sounds expensive, what it in fact did was to reduce the actual revenue costs of running the centre from -- the current price is about £2 1/4 million a year -- to a revenue subsidy of less than £1/2million a year.
Presenter
Four years on from Ian Sproat's original invitation, a quarter of a million pounds of public money and Crystal Palace was no nearer to finding a role for itself in the 21st century. Brigid Simmons explanation is that it was not just Sport England who had second thoughts about the centre, the people who used it did too.
Bridgid Simmons
We also have to take advice from the governing bodies of sport and how much they say they are going to use it and it is the governing bodies of sport as much as anyone else who say they don't have the elite use that they had before. I mean, swimming for example uses it for running swimming courses but those swimming courses are for teaching people for coaching qualifications. It is not that their elite athletes are based there.
Presenter
This is just not true... David Sparkes is the Chief executive of swimming..
David Sparkes
We want it as a sport, we've been very clear. It is important for us for diving, it is important as a training and competition venue for the region. We want to see it retained, we want to see it refurbished to modern standards and I am quite sure if it was really brought up to world-class standards we could bring world-class events here but the reality is that it falls well short of that mark at the moment.
Presenter
How crippling is it for your sport not being able to put on world class events in the capital of your country?
David Sparkes
It's very crippling because the reality is that world-class events in swimming will only come to world-class cities and London is a world-class city; so the reality is that it is stopping us bringing world-class events to this country, full stop. So that's pretty important. But I think even more important than that is... how many London swimmers will be in the Olympic team going to Athens? The reality is not a lot and that's because they haven't got the training venues in which to get the training regime. Far too many of the London swimmers have to go away. We've currently got a swimmer who's training in New Zealand. Other swimmers have to go to Bath for training. That can't be right for London. We've got 10 or 11 million people in London we ought to be putting more people on the Olympic team
Presenter
Dave Moorcroft at UK athletics also says Crystal Palace has an important part to play in their plans
Dave Moorcroft
What's ideal for athletics is that we have three significant indoor facilities in London, one in NE London and one in NW London and one in South London . Now it would seem logical to us that the indoor facility for south London is at Crystal Palace and that's what we have worked with Sport England on in terms of what is desirable for athletics
Presenter
But it's importance is not just based around elite training and community use .. its the only athletics venue in the country capable of hosting a world-class event today.
David Moorcroft
We want Crystal Palace to continue as a stadium where we can hold major regional/national and international events and primarily the Norwich Union Grand Prix is a major Grand Prix event around the world we are very keen that Crystal Palace continues to provide that facility.
Presenter
This summer's Grand Prix will draw up to 20,000 people to the track. Sheffield has never had more than 11,000, which happens to be the capacity at the nation's other two athletics venues: Birmingham and Gateshead. But it ain't just a numbers game. Matt Yates, again...
Matt Yates
Everyone knows that is the home of athletics. Sheffield isn't , Manchester isn't , obviously it could be in time, in 20 years' time it could be because we're all associated with athletics. But Crystal Palace is the place for athletics. Crystal Palace is the place of the Friday night floodlit meeting of international stars and that is the place that made me want to run.
Presenter
The key reservation elite athletes have about the place is the awful decline in the standard of facilities. And that is down to the failure to find and fund a role for it. In the panic that followed the collapse of Wembley as a venue for the 2005 world athletics championships, Crystal Palace and Bromley were approached for a third time and asked to organise a bid against a green field at Picket's Lock in north east London for the event. They lost. Bromley had had enough.
Robbie Stoakes
We are still interested in securing the future of the centre however we are not going to take the lead any more we will revert to the position of being landlord and planning authority and therefore you will have to take the lead.
Presenter
Click on the Sport England web site. Go to National Sports Centres page and then Crystal Palace and there is no indication of the deadlock and dilapidation. Instead there's a cheery summary of the state of affairs..
Reader
Sport England is working with the London Borough of Bromley to put the right mix of facilities in place at Crystal Palace for a new sporting millennium.
Bridgid Simmons
The regional office of Sport England based at Crystal Palace so we have an on going daily discussion with the London Borough of Bromley.
Robbie Stoakes
That is not entirely accurate in the sense that we have had meetings with Sport England but that is to resolve the issue about the future of their lease with us.
Presenter
Ah yes the lease. It is not a simple 'will you or won't you' sign business. It is what is known as a full repair lease. That is the centre must be returned by the tenant - in this case Sport England - to the landlord - in this case Bromley -. in the state it was received when the Sports Council first signed the dotted line back in 1964. Bromley say this will cost anywhere between £15 million and £20 million pounds.
Robbie Stoakes
And that is just to get the centre back to where it was in 1964 when it was opened . It does not deal with today's issues relating to sport.
Presenter
Sport England put the cost at nearer £12m. Neither side have had meaningful talks on the subject anyway since another complication was introduced last autumn. Bromley have decided that Sport England aren't entitled to the rate relief they've been receiving and have sent them a bill for nearly a million pounds. Sport England have made clear this isn't helping them to put pen to paper. .
Interviewer
Under what circumstances will you NOT you sign the lease?
Bridgid Simmons
I don't know at this stage, we've got to sit down and talk with Bromley about it.
Interviewer
I mean you have had two years to come to some sort of conclusion about this since the last meaningful discussion on Crystal Palace...
Bridgid Simmons
No, we have got two years now, from now to...
Interviewer
No, you've had two years. Since you came up with a plan to spend £21million in the spring of 2001 there has been no meeting with Bromley about the facilities at Crystal Palace.
Bridgid Simmons
Bromley have had many opportunities to discuss it with us. In fact all they have done is come back to us with a rates bill.
Presenter
And Bromley will be disturbed to find out that Sport England now say, the rates issue aside, the main stumbling block is the £1.8m a year it is costing them to run the centre. They claim elite use is now down to just 4% of usage although Bromley dispute this. They say they can't afford to keep pouring in nearly two million pounds a year into a facility for which 96% of the time is a venue for community sports.
Bridgid Simmons
We don't have any other facility where we supply revenue support of £1.8m a year to something that is so predominately used by the community and that's obviously has got to be a factor in our discussion.
Presenter
On both counts there are chickens coming home to roost at the Sports Council. Bromley say the lottery bid rejected in 1999 envisaged reducing revenue costs from the present £2 and half million a year to half a million a year. As for heavy community use, it was the Sport's Council, when they developed their Sport for All policy in the 1970's, who invited the public in. Up until 1970, it had been restricted to elite competition and training. It's a bit of a mess. Something so big in English sport is on its knees because of a squabble over a rates bill and running costs. Meanwhile a multi-million pound facility is crumbling away. The athletics community is hoping for an eleventh hour compromise but are increasingly worried. Alan Pascoe...
Alan Pascoe
I was very concerned with a couple of discussions I had a couple of weeks ago when it became apparent that the situation there is far worse than we realised in terms of the stand-off between Bromley Council and Sport England and all we can do at the moment is stand back and hope that good old British compromise and commonsense will prevail otherwise I see Britain losing the one athletics venue that its got and this against the background of the whole Wembley / Picket's Lock fiasco so it is a serious concern.
Presenter
Within the last fortnight Bromley and the new chief executive of Sport England, David Moffet, have met at his invitation. Bromley understood there was an offer on the table. Instead Sport England's erroneous concern that governing bodies could see little future use of the place was repeated. The count down to March 2004 continues in much the same way as in 1994. Plenty of paperwork, but precious little progress.
Presenter
What do you think will happen to this place if the deadlock continues and in 2004 as now seems likely the Sports Council will just walk away
David Sparkes
Probably end up as a very big pigeon loft. That's the reality because at the end of the day the services in this pool are falling apart and there will come a time when they will have to close it. In 2004 the lease runs out and I guess the pigeons take over the building which would be a tragedy …
Russell Fuller
So will the pigeons take over
Crystal Palace? That was Kevin Mousley's report for On The Line.
Kevin will be joining us after the news along with the former sports
minister Kate Hoey and the new chief executive of Sport England,
David Moffett - who are in the studio with me here.. and don't forget
if you would like to contribute to the debate you can e-mail us via
the website...
Discussion on the Future of Crystal
Palace following
'On the Line' broadcast on BBC Radio Five Live
Monday 10 June 2002, 9:30 p.m.
Russell Fuller
It's a little bit of a depressing conversation to have bearing in mind we keep seeing wonderful pictures of magnificent stadia in Korea and Japan and it's becoming a real old chestnut.
Kate, do you get sick of talking about this subject?
Kate Hoey
Not this particular one, because the problem with Crystal Palace is there hasn't been enough public discussion on it. I thought it was an excellent resume by Kevin Mousley. One of the things that's interesting - if you look back to the time when Sport England turned down that sport's bid - it happened just the month before I became sports minister - it was the same period when £120 million of SE lottery money was given for a football stadium or, in theory for a national sports stadium, but actually a football stadium, without even having had planning permission. So I think probably, looking back on it now, the decision not to spend £42 million was very much based on the idea that they'd already spent £120 million on another big facility and I'm afraid, as happens in so many other areas, the sport of athletics and swimming and the other so called minority sports, although they're not particularly minor, have suffered from that and obviously the Lottery Fund has only a certain amount of money.
But I get very fed up with the situation where really this will continue to happen and all these kinds of mess-ups will continue to happen until we get it very clear in this country how sport is run and who is making the decisions because here is a prime example of everybody passing the buck and nobody actually being the person who has to take responsibility for what is a mess.
Russell Fuller
We'll talk about the specifics of the Crystal Palace situation in a moment but David Moffett from Sport England - you've been in the job for six months now?
David Moffett
Yes the 7th January. I well remember the day I started.
Russell Fuller
And tell us what you've done in the past because you've run sport in Australia and New Zealand in various different guises.
David Moffett
Yes, my sporting career started off when I was refereeing - I was involved on a voluntary basis, and ran New South Wales rugby and was involved in pulling together the deal with Rupert Murdoch which formed Sanzar Super 12 ..after that I ran New Zealand rugby for four years and then, lately the national rugby league in Australia. And then found myself here and so far I'm really enjoying it.
Russell Fuller
You come over here and hear all about the Crystal Palace situation, Pickett's Lock, Wembley, do you think 'what is wrong with the Brits, why can't they sort themselves out and build some decent stadia' or is it the same all over the world?
David Moffett
I think you've got to separate the issues out because if you are talking about building decent stadia - I'm sure that you and millions of other people will see a fantastic stadium during the Commonwealth Games that was built for substantially less than the Sapporo dome. I found it really curious recently to read in the media about the Sapporo dome and how a 40,000 seat stadium cost £250 million, well a 40,000 + seat stadium up in Manchester cost substantially less than £100 million and it's going to be a fantastic facility. As to the incidence of, bit more than an incidence, but Wembley, Pickett's Lock and the like, those sorts of things happen, but I don't think you can tarnish this nation or Great Britain for that matter with those entirely. People translate what's happened at Wembley into England not being able to host any events which is patently untrue, because if you want to rattle them off, we've got the London Marathon which is a fantastic event, which is organised so very well.
Kate Hoey & interviewer together
You don't need a stadium for that.
David Moffett
I know, but I'm talking about the way in which events are organised because people translate the difficulties of Wembley into the fact that England can't do anything right, which is wrong, because England does a lot of things very well. Every year, where you do need a stadium, you have Wimbledon.
Russell Fuller
Well things that have been built for a long time, you could go on couldn't you - Lord's - what a wonderful cricket ground, that has been developed and maintained and it's becoming more and more modern as time goes by.
David Moffett
So stop beating yourselves up. It's not all doom and gloom in this country.
Russell Fuller
Kevin Mousley who's in our Manchester studio?
Kevin Mousley
All the examples that David's just reeled off are nearly all private enterprises. Where it starts to go wrong is when the government in the form of either Sport England or Culture, Media and Sport or local authorities or super authorities, get involved. Because what happens then is the focus is lost. People do go on about Korea and Japan, but we have nearly as many new spanking great stadiums in this country. The big difference between let's say what Arsenal are about to do, what Leicester are about to do, what Manchester United have done and all the others, is there is one client there with one aim and they know what they're doing and they hire someone and it gets built. There's all sorts of people and all sorts of quangos, well meaning, kind of get in the way and get mixed up.
Kate Hoey
And they raise the money of course themselves. Our best football stadiums have been raised by football and that's why really if they want to build another new stadium, which is only going to be for football, they could quite easily afford to pay for it themselves. The thing, of course, about Manchester is, that it's predominantly public money. I think if it's either completely public or completely private, it's when you get a mix and there is no clear demarcation as to who's actually running the project. The interesting thing of course about Manchester is the end of it with it's wonderful facility, the Commonwealth Games we're all going to see the track and great things happening. When it finishes it's been in a deal, again that was stitched up before I became sports minister, being handed over to Manchester City, a so-called bit of money will come back eventually and we'll get rid of the track which could at least have been left under the seats so at some stage we could have used it again.
Russell Fuller
So you think that's a terrible shame?
Kate Hoey
I think it's a terrible shame, that once again we will not end up with a really good multi-use stadium, we will go back to being Manchester City - I'm very pleased for Manchester City because they've a bit of a difficulty there with having Manchester United in the same city, that it's good for them, but it's not necessarily a good deal for the country.
David Moffett
On the ground up there for Manchester City every seat over 32,000 that's sold, 50% of the proceeds will come back to sport in that region so that over the term...
Kate Hoey interrupting:
...well then perhaps you could put it into Crystal Palace so that we end up with one decent athletics stadium in the country that can actually take more than 11,000 people.
David Moffett
The agreement is for it to go into the region around Manchester and I'm sure that'll happen and it's another way of actually ensuring that - look I think everybody recognises that there's really just not enough money in sport. It doesn't matter what sport you're involved in, if you have a look at football they haven't got enough money otherwise they wouldn't have some of the difficulties that they've got at the moment. But in a situation like this where we are going to see some revenue returned to sport , it's a good idea.
Russell Fuller
But I think what we're crying out for, sports fans listening to this programme, would just say can't we have just one decent stadium. I know it's no good for people in Manchester necessarily if their elite athletes who want to train for it to be in Crystal Palace but can't we just get one, somewhere?
David Moffett
There is going to be one, it's going to be in Wembley.
Kate Hoey
It's not going to happen, you know it's not going to happen, because you lot have allowed, not you personally, but you've allowed it to get away with that, that at the end of the day £120 million of money which was given on the basis that it would be a national stadium with all sport, is going to be an all-football/rugby league stadium and if you want to have athletics you're going to still have to bring in a platform, take it out of use for a period of time, and no matter how new and trendy the platform is it is still not a multi-use stadium, not a Stade de France where you can go from being a world athletics championship to a world football championships to a world rugby and that is where Sport England's responsibility lay, to make sure the lottery money was kept for what it was originally put and it wasn't.
Kevin Mousley
Can I just ask you a question? We don't really want to get bogged down in necessarily Wembley for the whole time.
Russell Fuller
But I would like to get David's reaction to that point that Kate Hoey has just made. Basically Kate Hoey was saying Wembley is not going to be an athletics stadium, to all intents and purposes you might want to transport a stadium, a track...
Kate Hoey
And you know athletics will never be held there if it's under that situation.
David Moffett
Well I'm not sure whether it will or will not be held there. The fact is that athletics is capable of being held there and I understand...
Kate Hoey
So is my back garden, so is Twickenham...
David Moffett
If I could just finish what I was going to say. I understand that the stadium they're considering building in New York for the 2012 Olympics bid will have a platform for athletics in it. It may well be that this is going to be the way of the future with improvements in technology it may be easier to take in and out athletics tracks. But we're where we are today, and we're going to make sure that, the stadium delivers a capacity to have athletics there. Now I don't know whether it will or it won't - it certainly has been backed by the International Athletics Federation as being capable and it's being supported by David Moorcroft and athletics. I don't want to dwell on it.
Kevin Mousley
David you worked a long time in Australia and I think what a lot of the troubles that we come down to in this country is actually more to do with how the state functions and how the state views sport in the first place. Now we've imported a lot of ideas from Australia, now we're importing a lot of people like yourself, but perhaps what we need to import is the idea of a sports minister who has a cabinet role, who can sit opposite the person with the money bags and say 'give me the money, here's the strategy'.
You hear a lot of myths about Australia, but is it not the case in Australia that there is a fairly powerful sports minister who sits with colleagues and can sort of divi-up the finance pie and from that starting point, everything flows?
David Moffett
Yes there is but I think there are some other issues as well and Kate touched on one of those very early on and that is that sport in this country is just too complicated, the way in which it's managed and I variously described it as being like a bowl of spaghetti and you take one strand of spaghetti out and you can never put it back where it came from and it's still a mess. The thing that I'm very interested in doing, moving forward, is to try and simplify the way in which sport is run in this country and getting everybody behind the common goals because I think in our own way we all want to be successful for the right reasons, but we've all got to be pulling together. Now that's going to take some doing, but we're making a start at it, Sport England, we've just undergone quinquennial review of PIU, plus the arrival of a new chief executive and we will be a new animal certainly within the next six months and we'll be much more focussed on delivering really good outcomes.
Kevin Mousley
What you won't be is a powerful body, because in the case of Crystal Palace, without going into the detail of that again, you had to ask a local authority. A local authority didn't have any money or political clout to take its own decisions, take a lead, and effectively what you're trying to do in sport in this country. You're saying 'this is how we would like it to be, please agree with us, please give us the money, please national governing bodies behave yourselves and do as you're told and it will all be alright'. And that is your fundamental weakness. You can come up with all the good ideas you like, but when it comes to execution you haven't got any clout either.
David Moffett
Well all I can do is say we'll sit down in say 12 months time and we'll see where we are on that point that you've just raised, because quite clearly I've been brought in here to do a job and one of the things I've got to achieve is this very specific area of Sport England being a much greater focus for sport in this country. And I'm not able to go into detail on how we're going to achieve that, but we will achieve that and I think it's very important that we achieve that.
Kevin Mousley
You have to achieve that by guile at the end of the day, don't you?
David Moffett
No I don't think so. I'm a mixture of Yorkshire man and Australian and I don't think we have much guile. What we intend to do is try and take people with us. There's no point in playing politics on this...
Kevin Mousley
You have to.
David Moffett
That's where the problems lie - if you start playing politics, you're not going to get anywhere.
Kate Hoey
The reality is the Chancellor's got the money and the politics is in convincing the Chancellor of the Exchequer actually spending money and investing in sport is good for all sorts of other things this country wants to achieve. There is one good thing happening and that is the cabinet office is doing a review now of sport. It's very high level, it's being done by independent people as well as within the cabinet office, reporting directly to the Prime minister and I hope that it's going to be very radical, and it's looking at structures as well. If they don't grasp the nettle this time, in terms of the structure, where we've got five sports councils, a central council/committee for recreation, huge numbers of bodies and with the sports minister literally sitting there and all they do is pass the money from the chancellor via the DCMS out to these quangos who then carry on doing things and really the role of the sports minister has no power in relation to say, what happens in Australia or France or any other European country.
Russell Fuller
Can you give us a reflection on that Kate because people talk about the sports minister and we get people phoning up five live in the morning saying why don't the sports minister and Richard Caborn do this, that and the other? Perhaps you'd like to explain quite how feeble the post is?
Kate Hoey
Well first of all the sports minister is only a minister within the Department of Culture Media & Sport, which is a fairly dysfunctional, and certainly was dysfunctional department made up of all sorts of different bits, so called 'culture' that have been brought together under a secretary of state who may or may not know and care about sport and they're the person in cabinet who speaks up for the whole department. So everything that the sports minister does in a way, has to have the support of the Secretary of State and then of course you've got perhaps special advisors at Downing Street who've got a particular interest in sport who also put their oar in whenever they want something to happen and the reality is that the money comes straight through. We argued strongly and I managed to get the exchequer funding doubled to the hugely big amount of £103 million when I was there. But that goes straight out, most of it, to the sports councils, who then have a kind of guidance of how they're meant to spend that money. But there has still not been done a full audit for example of how bad all our swimming pools are, how many of them are going to need replacing, how many local authority leisure centres are going to need replacing. The money from the lottery, which has made a great difference, can't do everything and there is this idea somehow that the lottery can pay for it. Lottery sales are going down, they're certainly not going up, and the reality is that we are going to have to convince the chancellor that more money has to enter the sport.
Russell Fuller
The changes have been very cosmetic over the past few years, I often wonder if we actually get the sports minister that we deserve. I'm choosing my words very carefully, but what I mean is I don't think the British public put sport high enough on their list of priorities because if they were prepared to pay extra tax for better stadia, better grass roots development, then fantastic. But...
Kate Hoey
If they were prepared to lobby even...
Kevin Mousley
I think the British public do put sport way up there. I think government has never had a serious debate with itself as to where it should be. Last October/November, I did a series with Denise Lewis called A Sporting Journey and we went to about 36 locations all over the country - you would be amazed at the commitment to tiny little sports that huge swathes of the population get up to, and it gets lost in the swamp of football ...and at no better time than this and I'm speaking as a football fan who's glued to the world cup - but there are hundreds and thousands, millions of people for whom sport is a very central part of their lives and it's never really been taken very, very seriously there's never really been a debate in government about ... there's never been any joined up policy that's part of the difficulty...
David Moffett
What you've just hit on is a very important point and it's the role that the huge army of volunteers and the voluntary sector play in Sport. I'll give you a good example of the difference between Australia and here. In Australia during the bush fires that you may have seen on your television screens early on this year - most of those fires were fought by voluntary firefighters who came from all over Australia. When they got the fires under control, they weren't just patted on the back and sent away they were give a ticker-tape parade down George Street, which is the main street of Sydney. Now you contrast that with the Sports Volunteer of the Year awards that Sport England ran at the end of last year, which I attended when I came over three weeks prior to Christmas, not one member of the media bothered to turn up to that. That's what we think of volunteers in this country. Sport in this country, as in Australia as in New Zealand, would collapse without volunteers. There is some huge value put on volunteers not just in the sports area but also right across the whole sector of society. And I think that's an area that's got to be addressed.
Kate Hoey
The problem is that a lot of the volunteers who are running little tiny sports clubs, in order to get back-up and support and help, have to go through a hugely bureaucratic process applying for the lottery - going through the biggest amount of bureaucracy imaginable and yet the money never seems to come down to help the small groups it's always as a result of having to twist themselves through hoops to apply for some kind of new initiative that Sport England has brought out . And the reality is that, you're absolutely right, if the volunteers weren't there most of our youngsters would get very little chance of sport because schools are still not providing enough opportunities.
David Moffett
Kate, I invite you to come in and have a look at Sport England in 12 months time.
Kate Hoey
I wish you every bit of success, I had my own problems with the previous Chief Executive and I know how much there was a change needed and I really do hope that you are very very successful but you've got to have the back up and I'm not sure, as was said by Kevin, that you've really got it - that there's anyone really there with the power?
Kevin Mousley
I think another thing I'd like to reflect on here at this point is the structure of local government - I don't know how it worked in Sydney but Crystal Palace's problem is not the willingness or otherwise of Sport England to do something about it, or indeed Bromley, but it's the fact of Bromley. Bromley is a borough with not a great deep pocket. You spoke earlier about the Commonwealth Games in Manchester. Manchester had to dip into its pockets, into its reserves and come up with £20/30 million to make this work in the end. Now Manchester can do that because it's a big city. When you're trying to develop sport - I would suggest, and Kate would know better than me perhaps, that you're up against the civic structure of this country. It's just yet another complication. When you look at Wembley for example, it's in Brent. Brent's interest in the Wembley project, I would say, is more to do with the infrastructure outside Wembley than whatever is going to go on inside Wembley. And that is another example of how the many disparate elements that come together to try and make sport work in this country kind of fail because they're all really batting their own corner.
David Moffett
But Kevin it's not just this country. I was in New Zealand running New Zealand rugby when Wellington was interested in hosting the next Commonwealth Games, which is going to Melbourne. And they just couldn't compete with Melbourne. New Zealand couldn't compete with Melbourne. So that unfortunately is one of the realities of putting on major sporting events. That they are going to have to go to larger centres and places where you can make them work economically because... I mean just as in Sydney and the debate at the moment about the bid for the 2012 Olympics here in London, governments are increasingly reluctant to put huge amounts of public money into those events. And in Sydney, for example, you're an awfully long way away.
Russell Fuller
It's been shrunk hasn't it?
Kevin Mousley
Surely we weren't victims of Australian hype?
Kate Hoey
I saw Kathy Freeman from very high up and the sight line seemed OK.
David Moffett
It's no longer hosting athletics. They've ripped the track up.
Russell Fuller
Let me just say that you're listening to David Moffat, the Chief Executive of Sport England, Kate Hoey, the former Sports Minister and Kevin Mousley who just presented our On the Line report in the last half hour. This is Sport on Five with Russell Fuller through until 10 o'clock tonight...
We should try and get some answers about Crystal Palace shouldn't we before the programme goes off the air.
Kevin Mousley
Have you been to Crystal Palace David?
David Moffett
No but we're holding our next meeting with Bromley at Crystal Palace so that I can have a look at it for myself. Crystal Palace is obviously high on my agenda at the moment and I do have a rule of not discussing, in public, issues such as this that are as sensitive as this.
Russell Fuller
So you're not going to tell us about your meeting with Bromley Council?
David Moffett
No, no, I would have hoped when we left that meeting we all agreed that we would say nothing because we want to find a solution to this and the best way for us to find a solution to it is to try and take away the emotion and I know that's not always possible in sport because sport is a lot about emotion and passion but at the end of the day it's not going to do anybody any good for us to be debating this thing at great length in the public domain at this stage.
Kevin Mousley
But there is a fundamental point here at Crystal Palace which is - because of the lease which means that one way or other you've got a lot of money to spend on the place - is that you're seeking to defray the costs of running it. Now, really it seems to me, drawing together everything that I investigated there, that that is the nub of the issue, is that you don't want to carry on paying that, and you're really looking for someone else to pick up part or all of that tab and that's the basis of negotiation.
David Moffett
Well the negotiation has to be had. I think everybody will acknowledge that there is a great deal of pressure on our funds in Sport England and a great deal of pressure on us to ensure that we spend them in the right way. For example, when I came here I took 10% out of our overheads budget because I'm absolutely committed to getting as much of our funds as possible to the end user. In that scenario and in declining lottery sales, we have some very tough decisions to make but at the end of the day, we are prepared to sit down with Bromley and talk about this. Now I know that there's been a lot of talking in the past and I wasn't involved in any part of that. The ball quite clearly is in our court at the moment and we agreed that with Bromley the other day and we'll be going back to them shortly and we will be meeting at Crystal Palace.
Kate Hoey
I hope also you make a point of attending the Grand Prix there because actually to see a Grand Prix at Crystal Palace, still, in spite of all the problems there in a good evening, with a huge crowd, it's a fantastic occasion.
Kevin Mousley
It's a Wimbledon experience in the athletics world.
Kate Hoey
It is. It would be quite criminal if we can spend £120 million on building a football stadium at Wembley, I would suggest you try and get that money back because they've defaulted and use half of it to make Crystal Palace into the most wonderful, world known famous within athletics as much as Wembley is in football.
Russell Fuller
So David, this lease would have to be resigned by March 2004, that's the correct date is it?
David Moffett
Yes that's right, that's when it runs out.
Russell Fuller
And the big problem for you is as I understand it, is that if you did decide not to re-sign that lease, and it was returned, then it would have to be in the condition that it was when the lease was originally signed, obviously not by yourselves, in 1964, and there's a figure of £15 - £20 million put on those improvements? So, have you really got a choice here?
David Moffett
Well Brigid Simmonds during her interview alluded to the fact that there is a dilapidations issue and also a refurbishment issue, and those are the discussions that we're currently having with Bromley which I think are better had with them than...
Russell Fuller
Will you ever think of trying to get the building de-listed because once you walk inside that sports hall, it's typically English really isn't it? You've got this building that's utterly impractical for sport, for the reason it was designed for in the first place and it gets listed! Like it's some sort of monument.
Kate Hoey
I bet if it had been a football stadium it wouldn't have been listed, if they'd wanted to knock it down - by the previous minister.
Russell Fuller
So David at the moment, all options available? Is that the case? A complete renovation of Crystal Palace athletics and swimming still very much an option?
David Moffett
Well I don't want to go into any option at the moment.
Russell Fuller
Is there anything that's been ruled out at this stage?
David Moffett
I'm going into this with a very open mind. At the moment I'm in the process as I said the ball's in our court, we have got to get some information that I think is very critical to the ongoing discussion and then we'll have a meeting with Bromley and we'll see what comes out of it.
Kevin Mousley
One of the disappointments I had in this programme is that I tried and tried and e-mailed and phoned the Greater London Authority and I got no response from them at all. Presumably London, the metropolitan authority, would have some role to play in the future of the capital's sporting infrastructure, particularly those bits of it that are deemed of national importance, like Crystal Palace?
Kate Hoey
Well certainly if London was ever going to, and Ken Livingstone's very keen for London to host an Olympic bid in the future, then I would have thought to not spend the money now on Crystal Palace would be rather short-sighted because it could be used in some aspect of an Olympic games. But I'm pleased that David is saying that all options are open. I'm not sure they need to do an awful lot more, looking at things; I think there must be filing cabinets full of it.
Kevin Mousley
Well that's the frustration that people who aren't involved more close up just want answers and think well this was an issue rejected in when? 97 or 99? it's been rejected at different times, we're getting fed up. We want an athletics stadium somewhere.
David Moffett
Sure, and I've given them a commitment to get on with this from Sport England's perspective and that's what we will do. I've got to get some information then we'll go back to them..
Kevin Mousley
Can I make one final point - one of the things that disturbed me in that report was Brigid's statement that swimming really couldn't see a use for Crystal Palace and that is just so not true. I don't want to go into the whys or wherefores of how she came to believe that but it did seem to me that it does show something of a dislocation operating between the information within Sport England and your major national governing bodies. The swimmers had written on a number of occasions saying 'we want Crystal Palace, it's very important' and somehow that message was just ignored.
David Moffett
I think you're right; there is a dislocation because I can tell you that different messages are given to different audiences. And of course the one comment, seeing as you've raised it, that I would say, in respect of swimming, is that it's quite clear that in order for them to get what they would like, in order to be able to get competitions there, 1) it would cost huge amounts of money and 2) you would have to have the current swimming pool de-listed.
Kate Hoey
Well I attended the English Schools Swimming Championships there, which were absolutely fantastic, and packed out, and it is really the only place that you can get huge numbers watching swimming in this country. We just don't have anywhere like that.
Russell Fuller
So something needs to be done - 12 months did you say? David?
David Moffett
I'm hoping to deal with the Bromley issue, certainly inside of 12 months.
Russell Fuller
So watch this space, some news hopefully will be imminent.
David Moffett
Well I'd never put a time frame on this...
Russell Fuller
But let's hope it's not another ten
years. Thank you very much indeed Kevin Mousely in Manchester, Kate
Hoey former sports minister and David Moffat the new Chief Executive
of Sport England...
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10 Jun 02 Last updated 8/7/2002