00:00You've talked a lot about your successes you had at Newham, but you weren't without your controversies either.
00:05One of those things, you were one of the main drivers behind West Ham's move to the London Stadium.
00:11Looking back on that deal and how it's played out and the amount of money it cost Newham Council and
00:15now the London Assembly,
00:17was that the right deal to make and was it a success?
00:20So, well, you must ask West Ham if it's a success for West Ham.
00:24And what happened, Newer Stephens, the one thing Steve Canne did do, he commissioned a report saying what happened.
00:30Newer Stephens' report came out and said, what you should have done is taken the bid from West Ham and
00:35the council.
00:36Because that was well thought out.
00:38The idea was West Ham run it, they maintain it because maintenance is a big thing.
00:42And we made it happen in the summer and we do some community things and of course let's make some
00:46money.
00:47And it was a really good deal.
00:48That was turned down by the GLA then.
00:50And what they then did was negotiate the contracts, which frankly are a shambles, absolute shambles and made a complete
00:55mess of it.
00:56So we had bought into a third thinking I wasn't allowed to be in the contract negotiations because I was
01:01a season ticket order.
01:02So we had bought into it thinking it would work well and then we thought, well, it's not working, we'll
01:07pull out.
01:07But we had £120 million we were going to get back through developments and other things for the investment.
01:13The fact that the current council didn't make that happen is down to them.
01:18But we reckoned it was worth, we reckoned it cost us £30 million, we reckoned we'd make £120 million.
01:23And we put that, interestingly, in the new magazine and we explained it all and then this council took those
01:29magazines offline.
01:31So we had explained what we thought we'd get from it.
01:34Was it right?
01:35No, no, we could have done a better deal.
01:36It could have been better.
01:37If only the GLA at that point had listened to, and that's Boris, if only they had listened to us
01:43and gone with the original bid that we had.
01:46As I say, most even said it was easily the best bid, it was the one that would have worked
01:49for community.
01:50So, yeah, you win some, you lose some.
01:52But you got West Ham, we'd have taken spurs as well.
01:54Don't be in any doubt.
01:55If we could have got spurs in, we'd have done that as well because we wanted to make it work.
01:59Hey, go to Stratford, go to Olympic Park, go to that and tell me that isn't a major success.
02:05Go to previous Olympic stadia and show me the tumbleweed that's running along with stadia.
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