Wembley - the venue of legends becomes a nightmare

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How committees and lack of vision turn Britain's grand gestures into fiascos

More than 18 months after Wembley hosted its last match – when England lost to the Germans – it remains a bleak and dilapidated place, home only to sporting memories.

Although many of its fixtures and fittings have been sold, it still awaits the bulldozers that will demolish the famous twin towers in readiness for the state-of-the-art national stadium long planned for the site.

But yesterday, even those who have followed the farcical six-year search to find a new home for English football were left gasping with the revelation that the old stadium may yet have to be revamped to help repay the £120m lottery money that was used to bankroll the grand vision.

The Wembley project was a product of the euphoria surrounding England's successful hosting of the Euro 96 championship and misplaced optimism over the country's chances of attracting the 2006 World Cup.

But the increasingly painful saga – with its uncomfortable echoes of the folly of the Millennium Dome – has become a byword in international sporting circles for mismanagement, confusion and delay.

In a stormy session before the House of Commons Culture Select Committee yesterday, coinciding with a far more friendly South Korea v England warm-up match, football chiefs insisted they were within weeks of clinching the £400m of private money needed finally to get the project off the ground.

But they disclosed for the first time that the existing stadium, built to stage the 1923 FA Cup final, would have to be brought out of mothballs, were the negotiations with Westdeutsche Landesbank (WestLB) to collapse.

Roger Maslin, Wembley's director of finance, said: "We still have a staging agreement with the FA for games to be played at Wembley. The only feasible way of Sport England [which distributes lottery money] getting their security back is to reopen the stadium."

Brigid Simmonds, of the Sport England Council, said there would be a "requirement to refit the site and make Wembley Stadium as it is work and for events to take place over the next 20 years".

The fact that the scenario – which would mean the "old" Wembley hosting the FA Cup a century after the stadium's inaugural final – is even being discussed reveals the depths of despair to which the project has descended. It also enraged West Midlands MPs who have been repeatedly assured by Tessa Jowell, the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, that a rival bid to build a stadium near Birmingham would be considered as a serious alternative to Wembley.

Committee member Julie Kirkbride, Tory MP for Bromsgrove, said: "I am furious the Birmingham bid has been so scandalously led up the garden path by the FA and most particularly by Tessa Jowell."

Earlier, two former Wembley consultants told the MPs that the competition to construct the stadium had failed to follow normal commercial practice.

David Hudson, chairman and managing director of the project management consultants Tropus, said "preferential treatment" had been given to the Bovis-Multiplex consortium when it won preferred bidder status.

He said: "The competition that was put in place was clearly not fair in our opinion."

Mr Hudson also said the failure to organise a "robust" competition to rebuild the stadium caused its costs to spiral out of control. The latest price-tag for the scheme is £715m, more than double the construction cost of the much- admired Stadium Australia in Sydney. He said the rules over the use of lottery money were breached by Wembley National Stadium Ltd (WNSL), but added that there was no evidence of corruption.

Mr Hudson was speaking after the committee revealed details of a report by the City troubleshooter David James into the management of the Wembley project. He expressed "serious concerns" about the way the contract had been awarded to Multiplex.

He said the "lack of adequate monitoring" by the WNSL board and a "failure of expected standards of governance" would normally justify a re-run of the whole tendering process. "There is no evidence of any criminality or impropriety having occurred to date in this matter but there is no means by which all questions of propriety can be eliminated to the extent that the contract would ever be regarded as 100 per cent safe," he said.

In its fourth investigation on the subject, the committee is continuing to pore over a detailed series of deals stretching back to March 1998, when the stadium was sold to the Football Association.

Plans for the new stadium – with a massive arch as its centrepiece – were soon unveiled with a start date of December 1999. Instead of the work starting, the football authorities, contractors and ministers plunged into months of wrangling over the design, particularly whether it should have an athletics track capable of hosting the Olympics.

The whole project was put on hold by the Government shortly before the election last year after it was approached by the Football Association with a begging bowl. Jack Straw, Home Secretary at the time, appointed Patrick Carter, a businessman, to investigate the options for the national stadium.

Based on his conclusion that a scaled-down ground at Wembley was the most realistic project, the Government had been expected to give approval on 19 December for building to begin. Instead Ms Jowell, acting on Mr James' bluntly worded report, demanded fresh work to ensure the propriety of the contract. She set a new deadline of 30 April, but the deadline came and went.

Ms Jowell is certain of a difficult time tomorrow when she is due to appear at the select committee and update the Commons before it rises for the Whitsun recess. As The Independent revealed yesterday, she is preparing to appeal on the football authorities' behalf for yet more time for the deal with WestLB to be completed.

The WNSL chairman, Michael Jeffries, told the committee that financing could be finally secured within 10 weeks. Off-the-record, the football authorities believe four weeks is a realistic timetable.

Michael Fabricant, a Tory committee member, said afterwards: "We can wait another three or four weeks – but if the Secretary of State now says we must give them another six months that is really not on. We have become an international laughing stock."

Yesterday the former sports minister Kate Hoey claimed the project had been "distorted" in an effort to win the 2006 World Cup and that the backers of the Birmingham bid had been strung along.

She said: "All sorts of corners were cut. I don't have the confidence that this project can deliver public good."

On the other hand, Sport England's Brigid Simmonds told the select committee: "We have this amazing ability in this country to stab ourselves in the foot and to go on reviewing things until we completely kill them."

The two opposing points of view go right to the heart of the dilemma facing Government and football as they agonise over Wembley's future. There is little sign of it being resolved as the latest fiasco over a prestigious national project deepens. Nor, it must be stressed, as Japan and South Korea prepare to stage the World Cup, is there any prospect of a similar event taking place in England in the foreseeable future.