£250,000 cycling “Departy” shambles finally admitted

Big loss on the Grand Departy

The Councils Executive will this week receive the final report into the 2014 Tour de France concert fiasco.

The Concert cost some £250,000 but attracted only around 1500 people to the Huntington Stadium

The report (click) makes salutary reading

It has subsequently turned out that this casual approach to spending taxpayer’s money was the tip of the iceberg with another recent report into the appointment of consultants also revealing that procurement rules were broken.

The Executive is being recommended to approve a series of recommendations aimed at preventing a repetition of the problems.

However, rather surprisingly, it appears that officials apparently do not want the following scrutiny committee proposals to be approved.

To ensure the risks associated with future major events are assessed and mitigated effectively:

vii. The event manual for each planned event must be prepared and supplied to the SAG and event management staff by the required pre-event deadline.

viii. For those events where ticket sales are required, to mitigate any associated financial risk, arrangements for monitoring ticket sales must be made before tickets go on sale and an effective method for the continuous assessment of sales against targets put in place. Any proposed price changes or special offers to boost sales must be assessed and agreed before implementation.

Where an additional event is proposed to be run alongside an existing externally-originated programme, it must be agreed from the outset that this can be done and that no element of competition is anticipated.

Councillors would be wise to adopt all the investigation recommendations

“Grand Departy” Inquiry agreed

Only minutes before the York Council Leader resigned, a Council scrutiny committee had agreed to hold an Inquiry into the Grand Departy shambles.

Sparse crowd for Grand Departy

The event lost £187,000.

Officials attending the meeting admitted that mistakes had been made.

The Culture Scrutiny committee agreed to look at the processes – including decisions on marketing and safety – connected with the event as well as the operation of the spectator hubs and camping arrangements.

All the opposition parties supported the review although two Labour Councillors at the meeting opposed holding an inquiry.

A report will also go to the Cabinet in January.

The meeting was held in public and can be viewed on the Council web cam.

Crunch meeting to decide on ‘Grand Départy’ Inquiry as cost of stilt walkers revealed.

Liberal Democrat calls for an inquiry into the ‘Grand Departy’ music concert are to be heard at crunch scrutiny meeting tomorrow.

Cllr Ian Cuthbertson, Lib Dem Spokesperson for Leisure, Culture and Tourism, last week submitted a request for a review into the “planning, promotion and delivery” of City of York Council organised events for the Tour De France, including the £187,000 loss-making ‘Grand Departy’ concert.

A decision on whether to proceed with the review will be taken at tomorrow’s Learning & Culture Overview & Scrutiny Committee.

Since the review request was submitted new concerns have emerged over public safety at the Grand Departy. Minutes from the July meeting of the council’s Safety Advisory Group (which took place just days after the event) have highlighted problems.

These included locked fire exits, blocked emergency exits and no licence to allow people to use covered seating areas. The Group said it would not support a similar event proposed at such late notice.

“Until these budget and safety issues are properly addressed many people will have little faith in the council to successfully run any large-scale cultural event.”

click to enlarge

The meeting comes as the York Council has been forced to reveal more detailed costs of the Grand Departy. Details can be downloaded by clicking here. The papers reveal that the costs of the stage, amplification and lighting alone cost more than total ticket sale income.

The Council have also released details of how over £60,000 was spent on other aspects of the “cultural festival”. Click here to download

. Details of the scrutinty meeting can be found here: .

The Committee is made-up of 3 Labour councillors, 1 Lib Dem, 1 Conservative, 1 Green (Chair) and 1 Independent.

Cllr Cuthbertson, who will make the case for an inquiry at tomorrow’s meeting, commented:
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Lib Dems call for ‘Grand Départy’ Inquiry as minutes of safety committee raise further concerns

Liberal Democrat councillors are calling for an inquiry into the ‘Grand Departy’ music concert as part of a cross-party scrutiny review.

Meanwhile the minutes of two meetings of the Councils Safety Advisory Group have confirmed that there was internal concern about the organisational arrangements for the concert.

Safety committee meeting July 2014 Click to read original minutes

The minutes suggest that, had the target audience numbers actually attended, then safety concerns could have been high.

The minutes of the meetings can be read by clicking the links below.

Safety Advisory Committee 30^th June 2014 (pre concert)

Safety Advisory Group 23^rd July 2014 (post concert)

Cllr Ian Cuthbertson, Lib Dem Spokesperson for Leisure, Culture and Tourism, has submitted an official request for a scrutiny review into the “planning, promotion and delivery” of council organised events for the Tour De France.

Last week it was revealed that City of York Council overspent its budget for the Tour by £60,000 with the ‘Events and Festivals’ programme losing taxpayers £252,000.

The poorly received ‘Grand Departy’ music concert at Huntington Stadium was the single biggest loss. The event cost £206,000 to stage but disappointing ticket sales meant only £19,000 in revenue was brought in, producing an overall loss of £187,000.

Cllr Cuthbertsoncommented:

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Loss on Huntington Stadium concert confirmed as £187,000

Event only took £12,000 in ticket sales

The York Council has finally revealed that it lost an astonishing £187,000 on the concert that it staged at the Huntington Stadium on 4^th July.

It spent £82,000 on artists fees and £94,000 on “infrastructure costs”

An “event management fee” of £18,000 was also spent

The Council went to extraordinary lengths to try to hide the scale of the failure with several Freedom of Information requests knocked back on largely spurious grounds and others still outstanding

With Labour now having lost their majority, officials have been ordered to reveal the full figures.

The mistakes will lead to renewed calls for the Cllr Crisp – who is responsible for Leisure activities – to resign.

She had been awarded a “medal” for her work on the event.

The costs given to leading Councillors were:

“Grand Departy” costs click to enlarge

NB. The Labour Cabinet on 1^st October 2013 set a budget for the Tour de France of £1,664k, to cover the cost of the event, funded from a variety of sources.

The outturn shows that the final cost of the event totalled £1,827k. In addition there was an up front payment of a “hosting fee”.

Links (click)

Cllr Keith Aspden, Lib Dem Group Leader commented:

“There are serious questions to be asked as to how the council lost money on the Tour De France. The botched camping plans and the last-minute decision to hold a concert at Huntington Stadium have lost taxpayers £33,000 and £187,000 respectively.

“The Liberal Democrats argued all along that Labour needed to produce a proper public business case backed-up with detailed financial plans for these events. Instead Labour shrouded the plans in secrecy and took decisions behind-closed-doors without proper public involvement or opposition councillor scrutiny.

“Given this, it is unsurprising that these council organised events have lost money and will now worryingly hit the communities and neighbourhoods budget by £60,000.

“Despite the mistakes made by the Labour run council, I am pleased that overall the Tour De France has had a positive impact on York businesses and the wider Yorkshire economy.”