London Stadium seating may need more investment

LLDC CEO David Goldstone has revealed the London Stadium relocatable seating may require more investment from the taxpayer to make long-term savings.  LLDC have accounted for up to £200m of future losses for what they call ‘onerous contracts’. A large part of the losses are thought to relate to the cost of moving the seats for athletics which cost on average £8m per year but are rumoured to have risen to £12m this summer to accommodate the World Athletics Championships.

Goldstone told the London Assembly Plenary earlier this week: “There is a challenge around the seating system that is installed and the cost and time of moving it. On the seating, we have specialist engineers in to look at alternative ways we can configure we have got there to reduce cost and time of moves with that may require some initial investment to produce long-term savings over the long term but there are incremental changes we can make, for example, for next summers athletics we have looked at a different configuration where we don’t have to move the seats all the way back so we do partial changes to each of the stands and it dramatically reduces the cost of seat moves.”

Goldstone was later asked whether it recognised the widely reported £8m figure of moving seats “It is a figure I recognise, yes, we had particular challenges this summer because we were hosting the biggest sports event in the world this year, with the world Athletics. There is an estimate of what that would cost to move all four stands in future years. The East stand the largest stand and most complex to move. It is work in progress, we have got a configuration for next year which we have agreed with UK Athletics which more than halves the cost. We have still got work going on with the engineers, a fundamental review which could reduce those costs much further.”

Goldstone confirmed he hoped the cost of moving the seats next summer would drop by at least £4m.     

The full London Assembly Plenary meeting can be watched below.