Q51 Chairman: I was not asking that question, I was simply trying to find out from you, without you trying to blind us with development-speak, which we have difficult in understanding, why we would not be better off if the land on which the Dome now sits is sold for development? The Dome demolished and the land sold for development, rather than, as Mr Williams said, the rest of the land which you are selling off having to cross-subsidise it?
Mr Walker: First of all, there is a cost in actually demolishing the Dome.
Q52 Chairman: Remind us how much that is?
Mr Walker: We did not get a tender estimate but we got an engineering estimate; it is something in the order of £19 million just to demolish the Dome.
Mr Williams: That is going to apply at any time; it will apply in the future as well.
Q53 Chairman: As my colleague Mr Williams has just said to me, that of course applies in the future as well.
Mr Walker: Yes, indeed.
Q54 Chairman: So you are going to have that cost anyway.
Mr Walker: Yes, that cost would have to be met.
Q55 Chairman: So that is a duff point. What is your next point?
Mr Walker: If the land is going to be sold . . . It is depending upon the rest of the development; it is depending upon, as Dame Mavis has said, what improvements there are to the traffic management system on the Peninsula at that time, and it is only then you can take a view as to whether you think the Dome should be demolished.
Q56 Chairman: You are now reduced to saying that your defence is something to do with traffic management?
Mr Walker: That is one of the advantages of retaining the Dome because of the Dome activities. It means that the rest of the community can enjoy a higher and a denser development with the Dome in situ than without.
Dame Mavis McDonald: This is encapsulated in paragraphs 3.28 and 3.29 of the Report and was part of the basis of the evidence of the advice we got from Jones Lang LaSalle about why, as figure 18 shows, if you did a benchmark estimate with and without the Dome the deal came up better all the time.
Q57 Chairman: So because of this traffic point, because apparently the Dome is going to create less traffic at difficult times of the day or something, you are going to lose £48 million by not being able to sell it off straight away-there are all the increased costs. I cannot believe you would not get more than £48 million for it, but you are saying that just the cost of traffic is going to account for all that £48 million? That is an absurd claim. That is going to be subtracted from the rest of the value for the rest of the land, is it?
Mr Walker: The calculation that was done by our advisers was that the overall Peninsula is worth £30 million more with the Dome in situ than without the Dome.
Q58 Chairman: Explain that to us.
Mr Walker: They modelled the amount of development that could be delivered on the rest of the Peninsula together with development on the Dome site itself and because, again, as I make the point about the traffic, the capacity on the Peninsula is dictated by the amount of the transportation requirements, and in order to maximise the development on the Dome and the rest of the Peninsula, from which the taxpayer benefits, it was better to have the Dome in situ than to demolish the Dome. Also the fact is that we will get any profits made from the Dome-we get a share. So it is not all money lost to the taxpayer.
Q59 Mr Williams: That is questionable because the fact that the Dome is to be there limited the number of bidders who were willing to come forward for the project, and if it had been offered as a potentially cleared site it would have attracted a completely different market; added to which the Dome itself, a large part of it, is in a rather preferential position vis-á-vis the river. So the land itself was probably higher in value than the once polluted land that is further inland from the river. So your argument does not hold up at all.
Dame Mavis McDonald: We would be very happy, obviously, to supply you with an extra note which shows how JLL did this assessment1.
Q60 Chairman: Try to answer it now. It is an open session being broadcast to the public; they are interested, we know. They are not going to read this note, are they, so answer the point now.
Dame Mavis McDonald: I think we have answered it to the best of our ability. We are very clear that the scale of the development that will be carried out by the MDL Partnership and Anschutz is the maximum that the Peninsula will take currently on the basis of the advice from our professional advisers, and that if the land that had been available for the Dome had been free to be sold you would not have got any more development, you would have just had rather less dense development across the site. Chairman: We will pass to Mr Sheridan now.
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