Winners, losers and broken promises

Arsenal FC have more than last night's defeat to mull over. Their move to a new stadium has short-changed the local community

Published in the Evening Standard 18 May 2006

There's a cloud over Highbury today. The whole of N5 was readying itself for a victory parade; instead it will be a day for stoicism and graceful acceptance of defeat. The talk in Gunner-land will not be of Thierry's glory or Arsene's magic, but of a Champions League final marred by a red card, missed opportunities and heavy disappointment.

Now, I don’t want to add to their woes, but there's another, different competition which Arsenal deserve to lose. In the contest to be a good corporate citizen, the club - not the team - have let themselves and their supporters down badly. Their conduct shames them more than the defeat last night – and it tells a story that goes way beyond both Arsenal and football. It’s a story about the power big companies wield in cities like London - and the failure of our elected representatives to stop them.

I’m talking about the new Emirates stadium where Arsenal will kick off the next season. It’s widely seen as a success story, built on time and to budget: a shining, steel-and-glass contrast with the fiasco of Wembley. But the Emirates tale is not all cheers and laps of honour. For Arsenal and the developers it hired have angered local people by breaking one promise after another.

When they were granted planning permission in 2002, Arsenal said that coaches carrying supporters would park underneath the stadium. Now that plan’s been dropped on grounds of “security.” Instead up to 40 coaches will park on surrounding streets, choking those areas to all who live on them.

That’s not all. Arsenal promised they would rebuild a sports centre demolished as part of the new development. There was great excitement, especially among Highbury’s young people; the club said its players and coaches would be involved in the new site. But that plan quietly disappeared too: instead Arsenal have promised to give £1m to existing “local sports facilities.” No specifics and no details have been fixed – and most expect Arsenal to spend much less than they would have.

What’s more, Arsenal promised to build plenty of affordable homes as part of the surrounding development, and 40% of the 3000 new homes will indeed be affordable. But campaigners have noticed that these low-income houses and flats have been allocated to the least attractive site: close to the waste recycling centre across Holloway Road, built by Arsenal to replace the old rubbish dump on which the Emirates stadium now stands.

How did this happen? Islington’s opposition parties blame the borough’s ruling Liberal Democrats. “They have been supine in the extreme and allowed the developers to get away with murder,” Catharine West, Labour group leader, told me yesterday. The borough had reached a whole cluster of agreements with Arsenal, but when Arsenal wanted to break, or “renegotiate”, them the council just rolled over. (Voter anger over that capitulation surely played a part in the slashing of the Lib Dems’ majority earlier this month.)

Local politics being what it is, there’s a queue of people ready to see this as a Lib Dem problem. The critics say the party got too close to the club, even posing with Arsenal officials on their election literature. But this is about more than a group of councillors who allowed themselves to be dazzled by a glamorous football club.

It is about the weaknesses of democratic local authorities in the face of big business. Arsenal had serious leverage: they could leave the borough altogether, taking prestige and jobs with them. (The club did indeed threaten to move to Kings Cross, or even to the edges of the M25.) That’s the last thing any local authority would want. On the contrary, they’re desperate to lure the big commercial beasts to their patch. Note the joy of a Birmingham or Leeds when a Harvey Nichols or Selfridges arrive. A Marks and Spencer or John Lewis is deemed an “anchor shop”: once it’s there, others will follow, securing an entire retail area. In their desperation, councils end up giving these giants whatever they want.

Even when a business decides to move into or stay in an area, it still has clout. Any council minded to hold a big corporate player to its legal agreements will face an opponent with much deeper pockets: it can fight a court battle with greater resources than any single London borough can muster. So councillors end up accepting defeat, allowing the commercial Goliath to wriggle out of its promises. The same process of intimidation might even explain why authorities who punish you and me if we stray anywhere near a bus lane, seem strangely tolerant of the supermarket delivery trucks which park in them for half an hour at a time.

In other words, the Arsenal experience is far from unusual. A Friends of the Earth report earlier this year found councils across the country surrendering to big retailers because they feared bankruptcy if they fought them. The group also found big players like Tesco regularly ignoring the terms of their planning consent. “The system is stacked against local authorities,” Friends of the Earth concluded.

But there could be an answer. Weak on their own, boroughs would be much stronger if they collaborated. If they agreed some collective standards, then businesses could no longer play one authority off another: there would be no way for a company to get a better deal somewhere else.

Councils could also propose a concordat with the businesses which most affect our neighbourhoods, an agreed set of standards to be signed by the High Street’s biggest names. If Tesco’s or Asda broke the concordat, they would take the hit of bad publicity, being named and shamed as poor corporate citizens.

The key point, missed by Islington council, is that big companies are not the only ones with leverage. Joined together, our elected representatives can have muscle, too – forcing corporate players to consider a bottom line that goes beyond pure profit. And that, as they say in football, would be a bit of a result.

Posted on May 18, 2006 10:06 AM

---