The Dome and a £300m scandal

Regeneration, they said, when every other pretext for building the Dome had sunk in the toxic north Greenwich mud, it's all about regeneration. It may not have been One Amazing Day. Neither was it "so bold, so beautiful, so inspiring that it embodies at once the spirit of confidence and adventure in Britain and the spirit of the future of the world" (Tony Blair, 1998).

Costing over £600 million in Lottery money, compared with the £200 million originally intended, it was not on budget. But so what, said its cheerleaders. Think of the jobs. Think of the indigent of Greenwich, and their heartwarming gratitude when this major investment opportunity turns up on their doorstep. (And never mind that very few people, rich or poor, live anywhere near the Dome).

Well, forgive me Mr Blair, but here's a short lesson in the meaning of words.

If a place is regenerated, it means that its value goes up. It also usually means that 189 valuable acres do not stand idle for years while government searches with increasing desperation for buyers. Jobs are created. Yes, the Dome created thousands of jobs for a year, but when it was over all the acrobats, cleaners and caterers were chucked straight back on the dole queue.

For a year and half, while government has dithered over the site's future, it has created only the odd job in security and maintenance.

And, this week, the Dome and its surroundings are due to be handed over to the Meridian Delta consortium for precisely no money up front. Lord Falconer, the minister in charge, says that the Government "could" reap £500 million profit from the site over 20 years. Conveniently enough, this pay day is so far in the future that we will only discover the truth of Lord Falconer's promise long after he has left office. It could reap this sum, or it could not, but if it does not the minister won't be there to say sorry.

Yet the north Greenwich peninsular has received, as well as the Lottery cash poured into the Dome, £147 million of taxpayers' money spent on decontaminating the site and hundreds of millions - the precise figure has not been divulged - diverting the Jubilee Line there. There is also a large bus station. Meridian Delta would like a £200 million Thames road bridge there as well, and according to some reports may get it.

Such massive investment should make the place valuable. Indeed it does, at least in theory: without the Dome, the site is estimated by property experts to be worth £200 million to £300 million more than with it. Without the Dome, and with the Canary Wharf boom-town one Tube stop away, one might have expected office blocks to have sprouted there by now. Work could have started five years ago on buildings generating real jobs. With the Dome, successive bids by Nomura and the Legacy consortium have foundered, and the site is apparently worth - but for that elusive jam tomorrow that Lord Falconer promises - zero, zilch.

Even if the jam materialises, it will mostly be made from the currently empty land around the Dome, not from the structure itself. For the Dome itself, in terms of regeneration, is a liability. It covers a large area that might otherwise be lucrative office and retail. It is the wrong shape and the wrong design to be a commercial exhibition centre or a major sports stadium.

Meridian Delta, which includes the American Anschutz Entertainment Group, has worked out that it could hold second-ranking sports like basketball and ice hockey and possibly a casino, but these hardly justify such a monumental building. Nor are these humdrum uses - currently catered for by the London Arena - quite the inspiring things that would make the expense of keeping the Dome worthwhile.

Yet the Dome stays, and will stay. Why? Those with an unreasonable faith in human nature might say it was because the Prime Minister, shortly after he was first elected, said it should be kept indefinitely, thereby making it, in effect, into an instant listed building. But bigger commitments than this have been happily broken. The real reason is that the Government will lose too much face if it goes.

One of the miracles of modern politics is the way that the fiasco of the Dome, which Blair once said would be the first paragraph of his manifesto for re-election, has hurt the Labour Party hardly at all. The Tories tried, and dismally failed, to make an issue of it at the last election. One of their problemswas that the minister most responsible for the Dome, Peter Mandelson, twice resigned for other reasons and so couldn't be made to resign again. Picking on Lord Falconer, who was parachuted in after the principal duff decisions had been made, lacked conviction.

This would change if the bulldozers moved in. If the wires holding up the roof were unstrung, and the thing came down like a deflating balloon, the photoopportunities would be devastating for a government as image-conscious as ours. Built as a symbol, the Dome would in its dying moments be as potent an image of failure as you could imagine. It would also be an admission that the last justification for building the Dome, regeneration, had gone the way of the others.

This is why immense ingenuity is going into an elaborate property deal that will keep it up against the odds; more ingenuity, indeed, than ever went into the design of its contents. It is why regeneration of the area has been stalled, and why the site will not be sold for its market value. It is all about saving face. It is about saving the face of the ruling party at the cost to the taxpayer of perhaps hundred of millions of pounds.