3.34 Throughout the period of evaluating bids, the Department has helped English Partnerships to evaluate the effects of retaining the Dome on employment and economic activity. Their analysis in May 2002 showed that the base bid should give 800 more jobs than clearing the site and developing it (for housing), and 700 more jobs compared with continuing to use the Dome as an empty space for ad hoc events, without developing the Arena and associated retail facilities. The Arena and its environs will provide the earliest 4,000 of the estimated 23,600 full time equivalent jobs to be provided across the completed Peninsula, helping to kick-start later development.
3.35 The Department have also sought to justify the retention of the Dome in terms of the likely "iconic building effect". This effect refers to the way in which landmark new buildings should over time draw in commercial tenants and residents by establishing the location and its advantages in the marketplace, thereby simplifying marketing, boosting property values and stimulating further property development and local regeneration. Examples that are often quoted include the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, which is viewed as a catalyst to regeneration in a previously run-down part of that City. In practice, the reasons why localities revive are complex and it is difficult to isolate within these the effects of the presence of a landmark building. For example, in Bilbao, many other factors have been at work including infrastructure improvements. It is therefore almost impossible to derive reliable, quantified "uplift" factors from examples of iconic buildings, and to apply them with confidence to different contexts like that of the Dome. As a result, English Partnerships and their advisers used no such explicit "iconic building" calculations to help them justify the retention of the Dome, though the key property values they had used in their appraisal (paragraph 3.19 above), were based on the best judgements of Meridian Delta Ltd, English Partnerships, Anschutz and their respective advisers on the prices that locations near the Dome should sustain. Our own advisers have found these valuations to be credible.