UPDATE, WEMBLEY EXTRA EVENTS APPLICATION APPROVED Quintain's comments on extra major stadium events application and officers' conclusion on the application to be decided tonight

UPDATE

BRENT PLANNING COMMITTEE APPROVED THE EXTRA EVENTS APPLICATION WITH JUST ONE VOTE AGAINST. MINUTES WILL GO TO PLANNING COMMITTEE BECAUSE OF WIDER ISSUES RAISED.

The application by Wembley National Stadium Ltd (WNSL) for additional major events at the stadium will be heard at 6pm tonight. The officer's report to the Planning Committee can be read HERE. The public can attend the meeting in person at the Civic Centre or watch online HERE.

While the full report can be read on the link above I print below two significant extracts. Quintain Ltd is the owner of  some land within the planning application area and their developments around the stadium now has a large number of residents, many of whom have become restive over the impact of Wembley events on their lives:

 

QUINTAIN COMMENTS 

 

The proposal is supported subject to the following conditions:

 

From reviewing the representations submitted by local residents, it is clear that event day management, and in particular stewarding and post-event cleaning, are areas of significant concern. Therefore, WNSL should commit to paying all the operational and management costs associated with the additional events and/or any event that exceeds the existing caps of 22 sporting events and 24 non -sporting events in a calendar year.

 

WNSL have highlighted the success of the triparty ‘Best in Class’ initiative between WNSL, Quintain and Brent, which currently manages the impacts of event days upon the local area and state this will be implemented for the additional events. Whilst we agree that the ‘Best in Class’ principles covering stewarding, parking enforcement, traffic management, toilets and street cleaning should apply to the additional events, the increased costs associated with delivering these should be borne wholly by WNSL.

 

To ensure residents’ amenity is adequately protected, WNSL should commit to the following restrictions on events: a cap on the maximum number of consecutive non -sporting events; a cap on the maximum number of non-sporting events per week; and a cap on the maximum number of weeks in any calendar year where the maximum number of consecutive non -sporting events or maximum number of non-sporting events in a week can be held.

 

The above conditions should be included in the s.106 Agreement (Deed of Variation).

 

Should they not be secured, Quintain reserve the right to make further representations. As a participant in the Best in Class initiative, and owner of land within the planning application boundary where many of these measures will take place, Quintain would expect to be consulted on the Deed of Variation before it is completed

 

We would also request that WNSL, TfL and Brent work closely on mitigating the impact Stadium events have upon existing bus routes and services to ensure residents are able to carry on their daily lives and move around the area on event days with the minimum of disruption.

 

 

THE OFFICER REPORT CONCLUSIONS (original report paragraph numbers)

 

 

144. The objections received indicate that there is a level of impact currently experienced by local residents as a result of events at the Stadium, with concerns predominantly focussed on anti-social behaviour, transport issues, air quality and noise. Some impacts are to be expected, given the size of the Stadium and its siting in a location surrounded by residential properties and businesses, within a dense urban area, although it must be remembered that a Stadium has been in situ for over 100 years.

 

145. The original cap on events was imposed to manage the impacts until such time as specific transport improvements had been made. Whilst most of these have taken place, not all of them have been realised. Circumstances have changed since the original planning permission in 2002, which suggest that the final piece of transport infrastructure (i.e., the Stadium Access Corridor) will not be provided in its originally envisaged form, but other changes to the road network have now taken place. Therefore, the Council considers that the cap remains relevant.

 

146. Clearly, to increase the number of higher capacity events to accommodate up to 8 additional major non-sporting events per calendar year would imply an increase in the impact. However, a wide range of mitigation measures have previously been secured and would continue to do so to help mitigate these impacts. There are ongoing efforts to reduce the number of vehicles on an event day, including additional parking enforcement capacity and an updated Spectator Travel Plan to promote sustainable travel patterns. WNSL and public transport operators work closely to promote sustainable transport solutions and maximise the efficiency of the network. This in turn contributes to reducing noise and air quality issues.

 

147. Infrastructure works including two-way working in the area to the east of the Stadium and the opening of a link between the western end of North End Road and Bridge Road to provide an east-west route past the Stadium that is capable of being kept open at all times before and after Stadium events has improved traffic flow in the area and assist residents’ movements on event days.

 

148. The Trusted Parking Scheme aims to ensure authorised car parks are responsibly run in a way that would limit their impact on neighbouring residents and reduce local congestion, whilst the Private Hire Management Scheme would reduce the number of vehicles in the area around the Stadium after events have finished.

 

149. Employment and Training benefits for Brent residents would also be secured by the proposed scheme.

 

150. With regard to antisocial behaviour, a financial contribution would be paid by the Stadium to Brent Council per additional major non-sporting event. This would go towards mitigation measures as agreed between WNSL and the Council which may cover measures to address anti-social behaviour.

 

151. Whilst it is appreciated that local residents face challenges on event days, the direct economic benefits for the local Brent economy of Stadium events are also recognised, including spending on accommodation, food, drink and other ancillary items within the Wembley area. The uplift in the event cap would also create additional event day steward and catering positions. Whilst some types of business would suffer on event days, many would benefit from the influx of people to the area.

 

152. In summary, it is recognised that there is a level of impact associated with major events now, and that this would increase with an increase in the number of high capacity major events. However, the measures proposed would ensure that this is moderated as much as is reasonably achievable. All are considered necessary to mitigate the increased number of major events which this application proposes.

 

153. A further consideration is that the Stadium can already be used for events up to 51,000 without restriction. Existing mitigation measures would be extended to cover this increase. Measures including the training and employment opportunities would apply more broadly to Stadium events, not just the additional major non-sporting events for which permission is sought under this application and would therefore provide wider benefits to local people and the local economy more generally.

 

154. The proposal is considered to accord with the development plan, having regard to material planning considerations. While there will inevitably be some additional impacts associated with an increase in the number of higher capacity non-sporting events, a range of mitigation measures are proposed and some benefits are also anticipated. The proposal is, on balance, recommended for approval.

 

Reading the report, although TfL mention the rail and tube routes they pay little attention to bus routes and their diversion and curtailment that impacts on residents.

Despite several protests over the curtailment of the 206 bus at Brent Park, affecting workers travelling to the industrial estates south of the stadium and school pupils when events are held on weekdays, no proposals are contained enabling the route to use the North End Road link.

The Empire Pool / Wembley Arena Story - Part 4

 The fourth and final part of the guest blog by local historian Philip Grant on a key piece of local history. Many thanks to Philip Grant for his tireless efforts to ensure our local history is acknowledged and celebrated.

 

1.  The original (west end) entrance to Wembley Arena in 2003. (Image from the internet)

 

Welcome back for the final part of this story. As we saw at the end of Part 3, the Empire Pool had been renamed Wembley Arena, and although it was still home to some sporting events, it was now being used mainly to stage music and entertainment shows.

 

If I tried to name all of the acts who have performed at the Arena, the list would take up the rest of this article. I will just mention a few, and if I miss one of your favourites, you are welcome to add your memories of the time(s) you saw them at Wembley in the comments below. Among the top British bands that have performed here are The Rolling Stones, The Who, Status Quo, Queen, The Police and Dire Straits. The first two of those both had drummers from Wembley, in Charlie Watts and Keith Moon!

 

It would be unfair if I didn’t also name a few of the top acts from overseas that have also performed here since the name was changed in 1978. Did you see ABBA, AC/DC, Diana Ross, John Denver, Madonna, Meat Loaf, Dolly Parton, Tina Turner, Whitney Houston or Stevie Wonder at Wembley Arena? If so, please feel free to add your memories below.

 

2.  A Torvill & Dean programme from 1985, and a recent Holiday on Ice show. (Images from the internet)

 

One of the original purposes of the Empire Pool was to provide an ice-skating rink. Although Wembley stopped staging its own ice pantomimes, spectacular touring productions from the “Holiday on Ice” franchise have been a regular feature at Wembley Arena since 1978. If you saw it on TV, as I did, you will never forget Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean’s gold medal-winning “Bolero” ice dance at the 1984 Winter Olympics. The following year, as part of their World Tour, they sold out the Arena for seven weeks with their own ice show.

The building was now more than fifty years old, and in the late 1980s Wembley Stadium Ltd invested £10m to upgrade the Arena’s facilities for both performers and the paying public who came to see them. The improvements allowed even more spectacular effects to be included, as the 1990s saw more than 900 concerts performed at the venue. One of the most unusual for Wembley was an arena staging of Puccini’s opera “Turandot” by the Royal Opera in 1991 (building on the popularity of the aria “Nessun Dorma”, which the BBC had used as the theme tune for its coverage of the football World Cup in Italy the previous year!).

 

3.  Concert of Hope, George Michael singing in 1993, and watching other performers with Princess Diana.
(Images from the internet)

 

Charity events had been a feature of the Arena’s programme for decades. The annual Concert of Hope for World Aids Day was supported by Diana, Princess of Wales, and top performers, including another famous musician who grew up in Brent, George Michael.

 

 

Cliff Richard, who first performed here in 1960 as part of a NME Poll Winners’ concert, had 49 shows at Wembley Arena in the 1990s, and was still packing the venue with his 50^th anniversary tour in 2007. A different genre of pop music also came to the Arena in the nineties, with shows from boy (and girl) bands, including Take That, Boyzone, The Spice Girls and Westlife. Two of those groups were from Ireland, but another Irish import, Michael Flatley’s “Lord of the Dance”, was so successful in 1997 that it returned for 21 sell-out shows the following year.

 

4.  “Lord of the Dance” programme and video screenshot. (Images from the internet)

 

February 1999 saw the first solo stand-up comedy act at the Arena (many more would follow) when Eddie Izzard performed “Dress to Kill”, in aid of The Prince’s Trust. Britain (and Brent’s) increasing cultural diversity also saw Wembley Arena hosting more Asian / Bollywood music shows, by performers including Amitabh Bachchan and Asha Bhosle.

 

5.  Eddie Izzard programme and Asha Bhosle poster. (Images from the internet)

 

By the end of the twentieth century, the original Wembley Stadium was about to be demolished and replaced. It had been bought, together with around 100 acres of land that Arthur Elvin’s company had acquired, by the Football Association’s Wembley National Stadium Ltd, but they were not interested in redevelopment. In 2002, they sold some of the land, including the Arena, to Quintain Estates and Developments Plc, which eventually bought 85 acres of Wembley Park.

 

Wembley Arena was only eleven years younger than the 1923 stadium, and Quintain were soon making redevelopment plans, including a major refurbishment of the Grade II Listed arena. Work began in February 2005, and included moving the main entrance to the opposite end of the building, with access from a new Arena Square (it is actually a triangle!). The project cost £36m, and the “new” 12,500-seat Wembley Arena re-opened on 2 April 2006, with a concert by Depeche Mode.

 

6.  The Wembley Arena redevelopment in progress, 2005. (Image from the internet)

 

You can see the Arena being refurbished in the photograph above, but beyond it you can also see an exhibition centre, a triangular office block and a round building, Wembley Conference Centre, which were built by the Wembley Stadium company in the 1970s. The Conference Centre had been the venue for the annual Masters Snooker Championship since 1979, but after Quintain demolished that building in 2006, to make way for its Quadrant Court flats development, “The Masters” moved to Wembley Arena from 2007 to 2011.

 

7.  Scenes from the Olympic badminton and rhythmic gymnastics events at Wembley Arena in 2012.
(Images from the internet)

 

We saw in Part 2 how the then Empire Pool was used for some sports in the 1948 Olympics, and when the Games came to London again in 2012, the now Wembley Arena played host to two different Olympic competitions. First it was the badminton events, followed by the rhythmic gymnastics. Together they brought hundreds of competitors, from more than fifty nations, and thousands of spectators to Wembley.

 

8.  Wembley Arena, with Hilton Hotel and LDO beyond, in 2013.

 

Redevelopment continued around the refurbished Arena and its square. Forum House was the first of Quintain’s many blocks of apartment homes, built between the western end of the Arena and Empire Way. The Hilton Hotel was another early addition, just across Lakeside Way (remember that the Empire Pool was built at one end of the British Empire Exhibition’s central lake!) from the Arena entrance. The former Wembley exhibition halls made way for the London Designer Outlet shopping centre, which opened in 2013, as did Brent’s new Civic Centre, on part of the site of the former BEE Palace of Industry, across Engineers Way from Arena Square.

 

9.  Arena Square, with Brent Civic Centre beyond, summer 2014.

 

Arena Square, with its seasonal fountains, has become a popular open space (especially since the trees planted along its Wembley Park Boulevard side have grown large enough to provide some shade). Another of its features, designed to celebrate some of the Arena’s most popular performers, is the Square of Fame. Although this is on nothing like the scale of the Hollywood Boulevard “walk of fame”, it has become an attraction in its own right. Madonna was the first star to have bronze casts of her hands put on display, in 2006. The most recent addition is Dame Shirley Bassey, in 2019, sixty years after her appearance in the first popular music show at the Empire Pool (although she continued to perform here well into the 21^st century).

 

10.  A Square of Fame compilation, showing some of the stars who have made their mark at the Arena.

 

In 2013, Quintain handed over the management of Wembley Arena to a U.S. music promotions company (now known as ASM Global). They, in turn, entered into a 10-year naming rights deal with Scottish and Southern Energy, so that the building became known as The SSE Arena, Wembley. This made little difference to the shows put on at the venue, which included the annual live final of the X-Factor TV talent show (with previous episodes filmed at Wembley Park’s Fountain Studios, until they closed in December 2016).

 

11.  Outside and inside The SSE Arena on X-Factor finals night. (Images from the internet)

 

The Arena’s name changed again, after SSE sold its retail business to another electricity supplier, OVO Energy, in 2020. What began in 1934 as the Empire Pool is now the OVO Arena Wembley. And twenty years after buying the Arena, Quintain sold it in 2022, raising capital to pay for the construction of more buy-to-let apartments as part of its continuing redevelopment of Wembley Park. Its owner is now ICG Real Estate, part of the private equity firm Intermediate Capital Group.

 

12.  OVO Arena Wembley, from across Engineers Way, July 2024.

 

I hope you have enjoyed discovering more about the history of this famous Wembley Park landmark and venue. It is a story that I have wanted to share for several years, and the building’s 90^th anniversary felt like a good time to do that.

 

As long ago as the 1990s, Brent Council and the Stadium company worked together to celebrate the sports and entertainment heritage of Wembley’s Stadium and Arena. They did this with a series of ceramic tile murals, which welcomed visitors coming from Wembley Park Station through a new subway and onto the newly pedestrianised Olympic Way. Unfortunately, in 2013, the Council agreed to allow Quintain to cover those tile murals with advertisements!

 

13.  Some tile mural scenes celebrating events from Empire Pool / Wembley Arena history.

 

Along with Wembley History Society and a number of local residents, I have been campaigning since 2018 to get these tile murals put back on public display. In 2022, Quintain agreed to put the mural scenes on the walls in Olympic Way, which they own, back on public view. They include the ice hockey tiled picture at the top of the image above.

 

The other four mural scenes in that image are on the walls of the subway, which Brent Council own. I had taken a photograph of the mural celebrating the Horse of the Year Show in 2009, but the other three images, showing a female singer (Shirley Basey?), an ice skater and a basketball player (Harlem Globetrotters?), are all extracted from old views of the walls. All four of these murals are still hidden from view, behind LED advertising screens.

 

Brent Council had the chance to put the subway murals back on public view from the end of August 2024, and there was a strong case for doing so. Sadly, Brent’s Cabinet was unwilling to consider that case, choosing instead to receive slightly more advertising rent. That decision will mean these parts of the Arena’s history (and more scenes from Wembley Stadium’s history) will remain hidden from residents and visitors for at least another four years.

Philip Grant.

 

TfL blasted over lack of information and misinformation re Wembley Park bus routes during 3 Days of Taylor Swift concerts

The forecast on Wednesday

 

 

The start of the chaos on Friday morning

 

I was crushed by happy, smiling and excited 'Swifties' on the packed Metropolitan line yesterday but the mood amongst Wembley Park residents  was rather different.

It started off early morning when the 206 route from The Paddocks to Kilburn Park was stopped before 9am affecting people from the area travelling to work, school or shopping.

TfL via Twitter denied all knowledge of the curtailment and suggested residents rang their customer service, depite the fact they are a customer service. Instead they devoted themselves to publicising their Swiftie alternative tube map. Whimsy is no substitute for a public bus service!

The TfL website failed to inform passengers of the curtailment and the result was confusion and over-crowded pavements. Particularly worrying was that school children at each end of the 206 bus route would find that their bus was not running (southbound from Wembley Park) or would be dumped at Bridge Park (if travelling north to Wembley Park). People working at Brent Park Tesco and Ikea as well as the industrial area south of the stadium were similarly disrupted.

About half an hour ago I found a woman at The Paddocks bus stop vainly waiting for a 206. She had been waiting for more than 30 minutes and said she would demand a council tax rebate.

Unfortunately this feeds a feeling that as far as Wembley Stadium, Brent Council, Wembley Park LDN (Quintain) and TfL go the needs of Wembley citizens (and particularly bus users) come way down the priority list on event days.

 

 Last word from a Wembley Central resident:

Last night when Wembley Hill Road and Wembley Triangle were closed to all but traffic exiting to travel down Harrow Road to North Circular Raid it was chaos . There were untold amount of Chauffeurs/Ubers/Taxi's etc all parked up on double yellows at the Triangle next to the railings, blocking the road into Wembley High Road.  All drivers were out of the cars, on their phones no doubt calling their passengers to let them know where they were waiting, The traffic on the south bound High Road was at a standstill.  It was complete chaos, I have no idea why Police or Traffic Wardens were not called to prevent this, it was still like this at 11.30pm.  The concert did not officially end until 10.45 that's when the fireworks went off. 

 The consultation regarding Wembley Stadium's Planning Application to hold additional major events closes on Monday.

Make you comments HERE. 

Bobby Moore Bridge advertising lease – the case for the tile mural

 Guest post by Philip Grant in a personal capacity

 

The Olympic torch tile mural, and the torchbearer about to light the Olympic flame in 1948.

 

Brent’s Cabinet meeting on Tuesday 28 May will decide on the award of a new advertising lease for the Bobby Moore Bridge, from 31 August 2024 for the next four years. They have two options to choose from, and Council Officers are recommending Option B for approval:-

 

Extract from the Officer Report for 28 May meeting. (Note that Officers can’t spell Bobby Moore!)

 

The Officer Report is heavily biased in favour of Option B, but I will have a chance to redress the balance. More than 100 people signed a petition calling on Brent Council and its Cabinet to only award a lease for advertising on the parapets of the bridge (Option A), so that the tile murals on the walls of the Bobby Moore Bridge subway, celebrating Wembley’s sports and entertainment history, can be put back on public display. This means that I can present that petition to the Cabinet meeting, before they consider the award of the advertising lease.

 

Most of the tile murals on the subway walls have been hidden behind adverts, or LED light panels which can be used for advertising, for more than ten years. They were installed as a public artwork, so it is important that Cabinet members can see pictures of at least some of the mural scenes their decision will affect. 

 

I asked to include a short powerpoint slide show as part of my presentation, but this was refused. Apparently, it is essential that all the screens show the digital clock, counting down the time remaining, when a member of the public speaking! I was offered the chance to provide my images in advance of the meeting, which I have done. This pdf document has been shared with Cabinet members, and I will ask Martin to attach a copy at the foot of this article, so that you can see it. 

 

This, for readers’ information, is an outline of what I hope to say during my five minute petition presentation at the Cabinet meeting:-

 

Today you’ll decide on the new advertising lease for the Bobby Moore Bridge. The petition asks you to award the lease only for the bridge parapets – Option A – so that the tile murals on the subway walls can be put back on display

 

You’ll see, from the photos in my presentation, why those murals deserve to be seen again, permanently.

 

Brent commissioned this public artwork, and it was specially designed to welcome visitors, with colourful murals celebrating Wembley’s sports and entertainment history.

 

There are eleven mural scenes that have been hidden away since 2013, including the Olympic torchbearer and flag at the start of Olympic Way, an important reminder of Wembley’s 1948 Olympic Games.

 

Other hidden scenes cover a variety of subjects, including famous concerts at the Stadium, and the Horse of the Year Show, ice skating and Harlem Globetrotters at the Arena.

 

Wembley History Society has been campaigning to have the murals returned to public view since 2018. Its efforts saw the footballers mural, with its plaque unveiled by Bobby Moore’s widow in 1993, uncovered the following year.

 

We joined the Mayor and Council Leader in welcoming the temporary display of three mural scenes in Olympic Way, at the start of Borough of Culture year in 2020, when the Council acknowledged that ‘the tiles are part of Brent’s rich heritage.’

 

Quintain put those scenes, just outside the subway, back on permanent display in August 2022.

 

Option A is the opportunity to allow every resident, and visitor to Wembley Park, to enjoy all of the beautiful murals, as Brent originally intended.

 

The tile murals don’t have legal protection, but they are a heritage asset, with historic and artistic merit. Brent has a commitment to value heritage assets.

 

A paragraph from Brent’s 2019 Historic Environment Strategy.

 

Good lighting in the subway, and the safety of everyone using it, is very important.

 

When improvements were made to Olympic Way a few years ago, Brent gave £17.8m CIL money towards the work, but allowed Quintain to organise it. 

 

The lighting design for the subway was based on the LED advertising panels Quintain wanted to install, even though they knew those panels had to be removed when the lease expired.

 

There will need to be changes when the panels are removed. I’m sure the Council can work with Quintain and its lighting designer on those, though it may mean a short delay in taking down the LED panels, and possibly some extra CIL funding.

 

But using the advantage of reflected light, off of the ceramic tiles, could actually reduce energy consumption!

 

[Although I won’t have enough time to include this in my presentation, when Quintain’s Head of Masterplanning and its lighting designer came to a meeting of Wembley History Society in October 2018, to discuss their plans for the Bobby Moore Bridge subway, it was suggested to them that the tile murals could be lit in such a way that the reflected light would help to light the subway itself.]

 

Second half of the Leader Foreword from the Officer Report for 28 May meeting.

The social value benefits, mentioned in the Leader Foreword, will be provided by the supplier under the new lease, whichever Option you decide on.

 

A lease under Option A will guarantee the Council a minimum rent in excess of ninety thousand pounds a year.

 

Option B would pay slightly more, but the amount involved is a tiny part of Brent’s budget.

 

The financial difference would be less than the cultural, social, educational and heritage value of putting all the tile murals back on public display.

 

I commend Option A to you, and ask you to vote for it.

 

I think my presentation makes a strong case for putting all the Bobby Moore Bridge tile murals back on display. Whether this is enough to persuade Cabinet members remains to be seen!

 

Philip Grant.

 

The webcast of the Cabinet Meeting can be viewed on Tuesday 10am HERE

Was the Bobby Moore Bridge advertising lease bidding process fair?

Guest post by Philip Grant in a personal capacity

 

I’ve already written about my open letter to the Council Leader, seeking to ensure that voting on Brent’s award of a new advertising lease for the Bobby Moore Bridge at next week’s Cabinet meeting is fair, between the two options that bids were sought for.

 

In this article, I will share my concerns over whether the way in which the Council carried out the process for awarding this contract gave a fair chance to advertising companies other than the existing “supplier”, Quintain Ltd (or its Wembley Park subsidiary).

 

The new lease was published as an open Invitation to Tender (“ITT”) on the Contracts Finder website on 15 February 2024, just as any other similar procurement opportunity would be. As the Officer Report to the 28 May Cabinet meeting shows, it produced 18 expressions of interest from organisations who might consider bidding:

 

 

The Report does not go on to say how many of the 18 organisations actually made a bid! This seemed odd, so I wrote to Brent’s Chief Executive, and the Corporate Director (Partnerships, Housing and Resident Services) who had signed off the Report, late on Friday afternoon, and asked them to let me know the number of bids received, saying this ‘is surely not "exempt information"!’

 

I received a reply, although not the answer, from the Corporate Director on Tuesday afternoon. In brief, it said:

 

‘On this occasion, the number of bidders and the sums bid are commercially sensitive and therefore cannot be disclosed. … Sharing the number of bids received regarding this tender process could risk prejudicing this particular procurement …. I apologise that on this occasion we cannot disclose more information.’

 

Ever since I obtained copies of the tender documents back in February, I have felt that the answer, the number of bids, might be just one (or only one which successfully made it through the vetting process which the Council had set out in those documents for bids received). It now seems that I will never know for sure.

 

The publicly available Report recommends that Cabinet: ‘Approve the award of a contract for Bobby More Bridge Advertising … to Quintain Ltd.’  As Quintain’s Wembley Park subsidiary already has the current advertising lease, and the advertising display screens in place, it was always unavoidable that they would have an advantage in the bidding process. But did the process reinforce their advantage, and if so, was that by accident or design?

 

I have taken a close interest in this matter, as I was the person who in early 2021 suggested to the Council Leader and then Chief Executive that when the advertising lease came up for renewal it should be by competitive tender. That should ensure the Council received the best possible income from advertising on its Bobby Moore Bridge asset, which in turn would make it possible to consider an option that would allow the heritage tile murals in the subway to be put back on public display. Carolyn Downs agreed my suggestion in March 2021.

 

I exchanged emails with Brent’s current Chief Executive earlier this year, to check that the competitive tender process agreed with her predecessor was going ahead. When she confirmed that was the case, I wrote:

 

‘Can I suggest, please, that the term of the lease for which bids are invited should be five years from 31 August 2024.

 

There are two reasons why I believe that this makes sense:

 

1. The existing advertisement consent (necessary to be able to advertise on the Bobby Moore Bridge) runs until 16 September 2029, so that five years from 31 August 2024 would be covered by that consent.

 

2. The reason why the four year lease to 30 August 2021, as approved by Cabinet, was extended by three years (at the request of the leaseholder, Wembley Park Ltd), was to allow five years use of the new advertising screens which the leaseholder installed in 2019. It was said that being assured those screens could be used for five years would make their installation commercially viable.

 

If any new advertising leaseholder needs to install their own new equipment, or purchase the existing equipment from the current leaseholder, a five year term would be more commercially attractive than a shorter term, and make it more worthwhile to offer a good price in the tender process.’

 

Kim Wright replied: ‘Thank you for your suggestion and we will consider this as part of our thinking.’ But when the ITT documents were published, this is what they said about how long the advertising lease would be for:

 

 

One of my concerns is that the Council Officer(s) who handled this bidding process were the same ones who handled the “secret” 2019 lease extension, using the commercial need for five years use of the LED advertising screens that Quintain installed as justification for changing the August 2021 end date, on the lease which Brent’s Cabinet had approved, to August 2024! They would understand the importance of that fifth year to potential bidders, and yet ….

 

When my enquiries in 2021 uncovered this lease extension, and some “very dodgy” features of it (especially over “proving” that the rent to be paid was best value), I complained to the then Chief Executive that there appeared to be “too cosy” a relationship between Quintain and the Council Officers involved. Were their actions here affected by that cosiness?

 

If potential bidders were not put off by only having four years to generate a profit from advertising on the Bobby Moore Bridge, after paying Brent a guaranteed minimum annual rent, they faced completing a number of detailed forms, and doing so within a tight time frame (by noon on 18 March). One of the most complex was the Quality Statement, with separate forms to be submitted for each of the two options. This was the introduction and first question on the Option A sheet:

 

 

 

 When you had worked your way down the form, this is what you would find at Question 5:

 

 

Quintain would definitely have an advantage in answering this question, as they had already installed this infrastructure in 2019. New bidders would have to do site visits, and research about local electricity supply, before they could start to prepare this detailed implementation plan. Yet all six of the questions had to be answered, and all of the other forms completed as well, otherwise your bid would be invalid (not a ‘compliant Tender response’). And then your answers would be evaluated, by Council Officers.

 

I was surprised when I saw the weighting which was being applied to the various aspects of the bids:

 

 

As the Council was supposed to be seeking the best economic return from advertising on its Bobby Moore Bridge asset, only giving the amount offered 35% of the overall score seemed rather low (although I don’t claim to be an expert on procurement!). As indicated above, Quintain’s prior experience of installing and operating advertising at the site would appear to give it a big advantage in the Quality/Technical section, which accounted for more than half the total score. And even though Social Value only counted for 10% of the weighting, this included features such as local employment (I’m sure you can guess where Wembley Park Ltd’s employees work).

 

I asked in my title: ‘Was the Bobby Moore Bridge advertising lease bidding process fair?’ I still can’t answer that question, but you will understand that I have my doubts about it.

 

Philip Grant.