Olympic Stadium: £200,000 is better than nothing!

A newspaper revealed today that the London Legacy Development Corporation (LLDC) will only receive a £200,000 profit from the Olympic Stadium.

The Mail on Sunday exclusively revealed that internal LLDC paperwork shows they expect to make a profit of only £200,000 in 2016-17 from all activity at the Olympic Stadium. That will include not just from West Ham games but athletics events, concerts and probably some rugby, baseball and motor sport.

This news shouldn’t come as a complete shock to many as the LLDC CEO David Goldstone recently revealed at a London Assembly budget committee that the former Olympic Stadium was only planned to break even on it’s running costs so a £200,000 profit would be a bonus on his previous statement. Mr Goldstone also revealed that the cost of rebuilding the Olympic Stadium will recovered from the wider redevelopment of the Olympic Stadium and not necessarily from the stadium itself.

Although the figure of £702m is widely reported as the cost of the Olympic Stadium, you have to remember that the first £430m was the cost of building the Olympic Stadium for the London Olympics and therefore nothing to do with West Ham or other legacy uses. Around another £56m was set aside in the Olympic Stadium budget to convert the Stadium post games to a 25,000 seater Athletics stadium so the real difference to build a multi use Stadium which includes football is £199m.

The wider development of the Queen Elizabeth Olympic park is expected to bring in up to £1 billion over time while the London Olympics itself has estimated to contribute up to £3 billion to the UK Economy so there is no reason why the taxpayers will not receive a return on their investment long term. Unfortunately West Ham seem to get mentioned in every headline like it somehow our fault or we are to blame for the costs to the taxpayer.

Without West Ham, the Stadium would be a white elephant with weeds growing in it like the Athens Olympic Stadium pictured above.  West Ham’s 99 year agreement with E20 Stadium LLP will help bring money, jobs and worldwide recognition to the Stadium and wide Olympic park. It will  help underpin the success and prosperity of the whole area.