London Assembly member and West Ham fan Len Duvall today quizzed LLDC senior management today and asked for an update on the London Stadium since the Mayor of London report from last December.
He asked about ongoing losses at the Stadium that was previously running between £10 and £20m per year.
LLDC CEO Lyn Garner explained “We are dealing with three extremely complex contracts here, they are interdependent on each other and ambiguous in large regard.
E20 was working up a new commercial strategy that will see us drive down costs and run more events and we have seen more successful events this year at the stadium than ever before.
We have driven down the cost of seat moves this year from £11m to £4m which is a considerable saving and we are having discussions with contractual partners in-turn sequentially about how we might improve things in a planned way.
These are existing contracts and can only be amended by negotiation and agreement with each party so it is quite slow work. In terms of the figures I think we out-turned just over £20m last year in 17/18. We are hoping to be considerably under that but will still be in a heavy subsidised 
position for some years would be my suggestion at the moment.
It is really important that we tackle that public subsidy issue over the next couple of years and there is much to do that we are working on to resolve.”
Garner added: “In my mind there are four main reasons for these overspends.
One is the cost of moving the seats which was £11m last year, there are quite high operating costs, so line by line we are examining those operating costs including utilities and how the operator is performing, there is a lack of commercialisation.
We have a license for ten concerts a year and we only did six in 18/19. We haven’t commercialised the assets yet for naming rights but to be honest what is really driving the problems here is are the low rents paid by the concessionaires particularly West Ham.
“The elephant in the room is, the fee that they pay us in their usage cost does not cover the event day costs”
The full coverage can be found at https://www.london.gov.uk/london-assembly-plenary-2018-09-06 Fast forward to 1 hours and 49 minutes.
Better do your job properly and maximise the income you can control then, instead of whining about a watertight contract that you can’t. You’ve failed to secure four of the ten concerts you’re mandated to hold and haven’t got any income from naming rights for the last five years, but the problem is West Ham.
Yeah, right. Lazy bint.