Olympic Legacy (Sheffield)

Paul Blomfield Excerpts

Tuesday 12th March 2013 Westminster Hall

[Paul Blomfield (Sheffield Central) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to be opening this debate with you in the Chair, Mr Leigh. It means a great deal to those of us from Sheffield to have secured the debate; most of us are here and all plan to speak. My right hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Brightside and Hillsborough (Mr Blunkett) regrets that he cannot join us, due to a commitment away from Westminster, and I am sorry that the Deputy Prime Minister, the right hon. Member for Sheffield, Hallam (Mr Clegg), is not present either, although I shall be turning to his contribution to the debate in due course.

The Olympic and Paralympic games were clearly a great moment for Britain, showing the best of our sporting talent, sportsmanship, hospitality and world-class sporting facilities. They were, however, meant to be more than only a moment; they were supposed to provide a legacy for sport, with lasting opportunities for our people, our young people in particular.

In Sheffield, we know all about the benefits of sport. We were the country’s first city of sport and are home to some genuinely world-class facilities, not only the Don Valley stadium, located in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield South East (Mr Betts), but also the Sheffield Arena, the Ponds Forge international swimming and diving complex and some great community sports facilities. Given their reputations, we have secured more investment over the years, with the establishment of the English Institute of Sport and iceSheffield. Such investment has delivered a huge return. For example, we have beaten the trend nationally in increasing swimming participation and in engagement in other sports. The facilities at Don Valley have inspired a generation of young people, of whom Jessica Ennis is obviously the most successful and best known.

The investment in sport has also demonstrated economic benefits. In the first 12 years of the new facilities, sporting events brought in almost 640,000 visitors to the city and more than £46 million, creating about 990 full-time jobs. For every reason, therefore, it is ironic and deeply disappointing that barely six months after the Olympics and Paralympics, the city council has been put in the position of having no alternative but to close Don Valley stadium.

I am sure that my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield South East will talk more about Don Valley, but it is worth noting that it was the first completely new national sporting venue built outdoors in Great Britain since Wembley in the early 1920s. It is the second largest athletics stadium in the UK, after the Olympic stadium, with a seating capacity of 25,000. As well as hosting international athletics meetings, it is home to a number of sporting clubs and facilities that are used by the whole community. It is currently used by the City of Sheffield athletic club which provides training, coaching and competition in athletics events, as well as in cross-country and road-running events, and offers coaching for children aged from eight years old.

Jessica Ennis is a member of the City of Sheffield athletic club. She has said that the venue held “great memories”, as it was where she started her athletic career. She has also said of the stadium closure:

“It’s a huge shame. To see it demolished would be a massive, massive disappointment…We’ve achieved so much as a country in the London Olympics, so to lose some great facilities sends out the wrong message, really.”

Her trainer, Toni Minichiello, has worried about the effect of the closure on the children of Sheffield who are engaged in athletics,

“because when Jess started she had the Don Valley stadium where, yes, we could train outdoors but there was also a smaller indoor area which we could use that made us fairly weatherproof”.

He also made the point that the closure reflects

“a series of systemic errors in government policy that are affecting a whole generation of kids who want to be involved in sport. It’s about neglecting basic joined-up thinking on health, education and sport...It is about failing to learn lessons from past mistakes, lessons we’ve had years to get right.”

Perhaps more surprising among those expressing regret about the closure of the Don Valley stadium was the Sports Minister, the Minister of State, Department for Culture, Media and Sport, the right hon. Member for Faversham and Mid Kent (Hugh Robertson); I am sorry that he has been unable to join us for today’s debate. In an interview on Radio 4’s “You and Yours” programme on 1 March, he said:

“I don’t want to see any facilities close”,

in particular one as “emblematic” as Don Valley. In full, he said:

“I very, very much hope that the local council, when they consider this, this afternoon, realise that London 2012 has created a unique opportunity for sport in this county, and I know it’s tough, and I know it’s difficult, and I know there are no easy answers, but it would be a huge, huge shame—it’s such an emblematic facility that means so much to so many local people…to close at such a time.”

We need to be clear, however, that the responsibility for the closure lies not with the city council but with the Government, who have given it no alternative. The stadium costs the council £700,000 a year to run. It is a national asset and, as the Sports Minister said, “ an emblematic facility”, but its costs are borne by one council. When the council is being forced to take £1.6 million out of libraries and £3.5 million out of early years, there are no easy options. Over the past two years Sheffield city council has been forced to make £140 million of cuts due to Government policy, with a further £50 million in both this year and next.

The cuts are unfairly targeted at cities such as Sheffield. That is why the Bishops of Sheffield and of Hallam, together with other faith leaders and community and voluntary sector leaders, have launched the campaign for “A Fair Deal for Sheffield”. In 2011-12 alone, Sheffield council’s revenue spending power reduced by £47.5 million or 8.15%, while Richmond upon Thames, which by any measure is a much wealthier part of the country, had a cut of a mere £1 million or 0.61%. If the Sports Minister were present, he might find it hard to appreciate the impact that that level of cuts can have. His constituency covers parts of the boroughs of Swale and Maidstone. Their cuts per person between 2010-11 and 2014-15 are £73 and £51, respectively, far less than the £200 cut per person imposed on Sheffield council.

Cuts of that severity mean that Sheffield city council and many other local authorities are no longer in a position to keep facilities such as Don Valley open. Notwithstanding the comments I quoted earlier, even the Sports Minister had to acknowledge that when he was asked on “You and Yours”:

“There is a direct causal link, isn’t there, it can’t be avoided, between the almost 30% cuts in local authority support and closing this stadium?”

He replied:

“Yes, there is a direct causal link, you’re entirely right”.

Nevertheless, he went on to blame the council for failing to maintain the stadium properly and indicated that that was one of the reasons for its closure:

“The Don Valley stadium hasn’t suddenly declined in the last six months. This is presumably an ageing process that has been going on for most of the past 20 years because successive councils haven’t invested money in it on a yearly basis that keeps it going and keeps it to a stage where it doesn’t suddenly require a huge bill at the end of the road, and this probably points to a lack of investment over a prolonged period.”

I take strong exception to that further attempt to shift the blame, personally and on behalf of the city council.

I was chair of Sheffield City Trust for the 11 years up to 2008. The trust is the charity that runs Don Valley and our other major facilities on behalf of the council through our operating subsidiary, Sheffield International Venues. As a trust and a city, we maintained Don Valley to the highest standards. There is absolutely no lack of investment, and there has been no decline over 20 years. I have the capital and maintenance budgets for the last five years, which show that £1.6 million was invested in keeping it as a top international stadium. There is a capital requirement in forward costs, not because of under-investment, but simply because it is sensible to anticipate future need.

It was not just the Sports Minister who weighed into the debate; the Deputy Prime Minister also did so, calling on the council to keep the stadium open. It is perhaps reassuring to know that the Liberal Democrats are consistent in a perverse sort of way. They are now against closing it, but they were opposed to opening it in the first place. The Deputy Prime Minister’s arithmetic does not stack up. He argued that one-off closure costs could be offset against running costs simply to delay the closure, leaving no money to deal with it when it happened a few months down the line.

The Deputy Prime Minister has form on these issues. Less than two weeks ago, the city council’s chief executive wrote to correct him on “inaccuracies and misrepresentations” in his comments when opposing cuts in council services. The Deputy Prime Minister cannot have it both ways. He supported and implemented massive and disproportionate cuts on Sheffield council and then stood outside local libraries in his constituency collecting signatures opposing their closure. The same applies to Don Valley.

The impact on Sheffield sport goes well beyond the stadium. There will be an impact on community sports facilities, which I am sure that my hon. Friend the Member for Penistone and Stocksbridge (Angela Smith) will speak about, and on school sport, on which my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Heeley (Meg Munn) will want to make a contribution. There will also be an impact on Activity Sheffield, the Youth Service and the voluntary and community sector, all of which engage the young and the old in the sports activities that are so important to their well-being. Yet when councils in our big cities are facing a struggle to maintain services, it is increasingly difficult for them to support and sustain facilities such as Don Valley. We need a national strategic plan for sports facilities and for the Government to work with councils to keep facilities such as Don Valley open and genuinely to help to deliver an Olympic legacy. The Government must play a role with the councils to ensure that we have stadiums where events can inspire the next generation.

The Government have given the council no alternative to the existing use of Don Valley, but the council is looking at alternatives to provide a sporting legacy. It has made a commitment to the refurbishment of the nearby Woodbourn Road athletics track to provide good-quality outdoor facilities in partnership with local athletics clubs at a much lower cost. It invited my predecessor, Richard Caborn, who is also one of the Sports Minister’s predecessors, to look at alternatives for the site. He has been in discussion with the two universities, Sheffield college, Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, Sheffield city region local enterprise partnership, the Baker Dearing Trust and Sport England to explore the creation of a new advanced sports and well-being park to provide comprehensive delivery of the Olympic legacy through a facility providing rugby, basketball and gymnastics, by adding an indoor straight at Woodbourn road to the facilities that the council is planning, and by linking to a medical devices advanced manufacturing research centre and a life sciences university technical college. This morning, at a press conference at the English Institute of Sport, he shared that proposal publicly. It has the backing of the city region local enterprise partnership and the other partners I mentioned as a project deserving consideration. Indeed, it also has the backing of Lord Coe.

I hope that the Minister will, on behalf of the Sports Minister, agree to meet those involved in the project to discuss how the Government can, instead of crying crocodile tears, offer practical support to an initiative that might provide an Olympic legacy for our city.