Taxpayer Money To Be Utilised For £35m West Ham Stadium Revamp

British taxpayers will be handed a £35m bill for a planned refurb of West Ham United football club’s stadium in east London. The government will fork out £14.5m of public money for fresh seating at the state-owned London Stadium as West Ham redevelops the west stand to bring fans closer to the pitch. A further £20.5m will be spent to provide West Ham with stewards for the next four years, the Sunday Telegraph has reported.

The 80,000-capacity London Stadium, which was built for the Olympics, originally had an athletics track surrounding the pitch, so the club has been attempting to reconfigure the ground to bring the fans much closer to the pitch, something which was a major feature of West Ham’s previous Boleyn Ground at Upton Park.

Under a deal signed in 2016 West Ham United pays £3m a year to the taxpayer-backed London Legacy Development Corporation (LLDC) for its use of the ground. With the LLDC covering the costs of the stadium upkeep. According to records filed at Companies House the stadium had made losses of £450m in the five years to March 2020. This came after the costs of redeveloping the ground ballooned from £190m to £323m.

A spokesman for West Ham United, which is owned by millionaire duo David Gold and David Sullivan and run by Baroness Karren Brady, said the tender notice for the stand was at the “very early stage of a process examining costings and ideas for improvements”.