Region takes on Whitehall to get millions for Tour de France plans to cover multi-million

Leeds City Council chief executive Tom Riordan and Welcome to Yorkshire chairwoman Clare Morrow will meet with Ministers from the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) and officials from UK Sport to agree a budget for the 2014 Grand Depart.

The meeting follows months of heated debate about the extent of the Government’s commitment to the plan.

After prolonged lobbying from Welcome to Yorkshire, which won the bid to bring the event to the region, and local MPs including Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg, the Treasury agreed to stump up £10m – but DCMS has refused to simply hand over the money to Welcome to Yorkshire to stage the event.

Sports and Tourism Minister Hugh Robertson rejected the agency’s initial funding application on the advice of UK Sport last month, dismissing it as too vague and overly-focused on marketing Yorkshire to the wider world.

There are suspicions in Yorkshire that UK Sport and DCMS still harbour a grudge after Welcome to Yorkshire’s maverick bid to host the event was successful ahead of the UK’s official proposal to host the Grand Depart in Scotland.

But speaking to the Yorkshire Post yesterday, Mr Robertson insisted it would be “irresponsible” to simply hand over millions of pounds to Welcome to Yorkshire without a detailed plan of action.

“We’re not holding back on the money at all,” he said. “But this is taxpayers’ money, and we need to have an agreed budget before we can proceed.”

He said detailed planning work for the event has only now just been completed, and that the total cost would be “far more” than previously- reported figures of around £5-6m.

Hinting at the irritation within DCMS at Welcome to Yorkshire’s success, he said: “It’s brilliant they won, but there’s now a very heavy bill and there’s no means to cover it. This is why quite a lot of this (negotiation) is happening afterwards.

“Had it been done through the system properly, all this would have been covered beforehand.”

On the extent of Whitehall’s contribution, he said: “I think what’s likely is the Government will pay a generous portion of the costs - that’s what we normally do.

“If you look at the model we’ve successfully employed for other major events, it tends to work on a ‘one-third’ basis – the Government finds a third; the locality finds a third, and a third comes from sponsorship.”

Nonetheless, Welcome to Yorkshire remains insistent the event should be used to market the region before a global audience, and wants Government money to campaign for Yorkshire.

But Mr Robertson made clear this remains unlikely.

“Government tends to concentrate on those bits of expenditure closest to its core responsibilities; the security, doing the route, the staging costs and so on,” he said.

“If Yorkshire wants to do extra things to market itself... Those are the sorts of things we would probably look to people locally to put into the budget.”