Eastgate wins jackpot to host Leeds casino

Leeds new large casino is going to be located at the next retail and leisure development to be built in the city centre, at Victoria Gate (Eastgate as was).

At a brief licensing committee meeting this afternoon councillors announced that after two days of discussions (and six years of planning) the licence to run the casino had been awarded to Global Gaming Ventures (GGV) ahead of a rival bid from Leeds United Football Club.

What is Leeds City Council getting in return for the licence to host up to 150 slot machines with a maximum jackpot of £4,000?

• An upfront payment of £1m
• annual payments of £450,000 or 4 per cent of the casino’s net gaming revenue, whichever is bigger

Which means that if the casino’s net gaming revenue is £25m, we’ll get £1m.

There’s a commitment too that 90% of the at least 205 jobs to be created will go to residents of the “Leeds city region” (not just people from Leeds), that there’ll be apprenticeships, and openings for NEETS (young people who are not in education, employment or training) – at least in the first year the casino is open.

“Social inclusion fund”

There’s also going to be money – “significant funds” – from the casino operator for a council-run “social inclusion fund” that’s going to pay for “activities to mitigate any potential harmful effects of the operation of a large casino”.

The details of the social inclusion fund haven’t been worked out yet.

GGV are also going to fund a “Leeds Responsible Gambling Forum”, set up an “Impact Committee” (to monitor the impact of the casino) and make sure that their marketing campaigns don’t target the most deprived parts of the city.

Once the new Victoria Gate development is built, Global Gaming Ventures will have to come back formally and get the council to rubber stamp today’s decision.

Developers Hammerson are expected to submit plans for the £130m shopping and leisure centre next month, with construction due to start next year and be complete by 2016.

Check the council’s press release here.

(Updated) Where’s the Leeds super-casino going? Decision to be announced Friday 17th

(Updated story, clarifying that decision being announced on Friday)

After years of controversy and speculation, Leeds is set to announce where its new Vegas-style super-casino is going to be located and who’s going to run it.

Over six years since the city was granted a licence to run one of the UK’s first “large casinos”, councillors are meeting on Monday and Tuesday (13th/14th May) to decide which of two remaining applicants is going to win the jackpot.

Their decision will be made public when the committee reconvenes on Friday (17th May).

When the bidding started last year, there were five firms in the running. By early March this year, only three were left.

Then, in a shock move, London Clubs International withdrew their application to site the casino at Clarence (New) Dock and shut down the Alea casino they’d been running there for 5 years, muttering darkly as they went that “financial and other burdens” attached to the licence were “excessive” and “not sustainable”.

So, it’s now a straight fight between Leeds United – who want to put the casino in the West Stand at Elland Road – and Global Ventures Ltd, who plan to put it into the swanky new Eastgate (Victoria Gate) development that’s going to be built in Leeds city centre.

Take the cash

New Dock – Alea jacta est

So how’s this new casino going to be benefiting the people of Leeds – those of us who aren’t going to be down there every day trying our luck on the 150 slot machines and the rest? 

Well, it’ll no doubt give us even more of what is officially known as “vitality and vibrancy” – more than what we’ve already got and are promised for the city …

And there’s bound to be a statement knocking around somewhere detailing how the casino promotes our leaders’ ambition to become the most child-friendly city in the UK (I just haven’t found it yet).

But, most importantly, what the casino will give us is cash.

How much? No-one’s saying, obviously, but chief exec Mike Ingall of New Dock’s owners Allied London told the Yorkshire Evening Post the council was asking for “quite a healthy contribution” from whoever ends up running the casino.

Justcasinos.co.uk is more forthright: “It is expected that …  whichever company the council decides is most worthy will be paying 25% of the super-casino’s annual takings right back into the council’s coffers”.

How much does a super-casino take a year? £20m? £50m? £100m? Who knows.

Feel a bit of Wreckless Eric coming on … let’s see the colour of their money.

People of Leeds get new health champion: out with the old and in with the … old

I’m not sure they get it yet, do they?

There’s this new organisation they’ve just set up to be the independent voice of us citizens/patients/consumers when it comes to everything about health and care services in Leeds.

They call it Healthwatch. Everyone got one in April – all over the country.

On the face of it, it might have been OK.

What wouldn’t be to like about a truly independent organisation whose sole function is to get OUR views (constructive, critical, complaining, congratulatory) across to the people who design, commission and run health and care services in Leeds – the clinical commissioning groups, the community healthcare trusts, the hospitals and, now more than ever, the council.

Someone we can trust to challenge the health powers-that-be on our behalf when it’s necessary, and to speak up loud and clear for us at the meetings of the Best City Leadership Network Health and Wellbeing Board (I kid you not).

Independent

In Leeds they’ve been working on setting up our Healthwatch (we couldn’t do it for ourselves, obvs) for the past 15 months.

They thought at the start about handing the new service over to the people who had been doing the “patients’ champion” job in Leeds up to now, Leeds LINk.

But when they asked around, everyone that mattered said LINk wasn’t much cop and wouldn’t be up to the task.

So they put Healthwatch Leeds out to tender, the contract got awarded to a consortium of four independent organisations, and a part-time, independent chair was appointed …

Which just left them to hire someone independent to run this new, independent organisation – an independent director. (am I labouring the independence thing?)

Guess who they appointed …

Anyway, getting the right person in* was a great opportunity to send a clear message to us citizens/patients/consumers (whatever they’re calling us these days) that the new organisation wasn’t going to be the same old, same old.

And a clear message to our local health service providers (the council included) that Healthwatch wasn’t going to be part of any business as usual between long-standing partners and chums in the Leeds health leadership network.

So, guess who they appointed to be our champion?

A senior employee of the council!

THE senior council officer who for the last 15 months has been in charge of (guess what?) commissioning the Healthwatch service in Leeds.

A senior officer who used to be on the steering group of LINk, the organisation that was deemed not up to doing this new job of independent health champion.

A most usual suspect. One of the gang. An insider’s insider.

Not suggesting there’s anything dodgy going on, but … but …

It looks and feels rubbish.

They just don’t get it, do they?

—————————————–

(* no idea which bright sparks were on the interviewing panel. Anyone know?)

“Duty of candour”? – the Leeds children’s heart surgery media fiasco – part 4

Odder and odder. The latest official announcements about children’s heart surgery at Leeds General Infirmary haven’t done much to help put the trust back into NHS Trust.

Or how else are we supposed to read the two different versions of events presented to us last night (Monday) by NHS England and the Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust about the outcome of last weekend’s review?

Different versions?

Well, the Leeds statement was pretty much all good news: “delighted”, ”now reopening the unit”, “analysis … of data … has concluded there is not a safety problem in Leeds”.

But it didn’t tally with the statement released by NHS England:

It DIDN’T say that the restart of surgery is going to be phased.

It DIDN’T say that the gradual resumption will start with lower-risk cases.

It DIDN’T say that a second stage of the review is now going to be carried out into the handling of patients’ complaints, patients’ case notes and referral practices.

It DIDN’T say that NHS England has asked for significant improvements to the way the unit at Leeds monitors its quality of care.

And it DIDN’T say that the review found that the Trust’s data for monitoring surgical results was “uniquely poor“.

“Duty of candour”

Now the Leeds Trust may have cause to be unhappy about many of those points. And it may well dispute the review findings and/or their interpretation by NHS England, including the need for a second stage of investigations.

But doesn’t it still have a “duty of candour” to patients, their families and the public, to provide them with all the information it can about investigations that have been carried out into the services it delivers.

If a second stage of the review is under way (or not), then shouldn’t Leeds patients, their families and the Leeds public be told?

If NHS England has (or hasn’t) asked for “significant improvements” from the Leeds unit to the way it monitors quality of care, the same goes.

And ditto if the review did (or didn’t) find that the Trust’s data for monitoring surgical results was “uniquely poor”.

It’s been suggested this morning (it would beggar belief) that the Leeds Trust was unaware last night of what was going into the NHS England statement: the contentious bits above, one must presume, referring to the “second stage” of the review, the call for improvements, and the “uniquely poor” data.

If that’s the case, then silence is hardly an option any more.

People will have heard about it all through the media and will be wondering why the Leeds account doesn’t tally.

Why didn’t Keogh say so?

Sir Bruce Keogh

To be fair, NHS England hasn’t covered itself with glory. Its medical director Sir Bruce Keogh admitted on the Today programme this morning that the data he acted on when he suspended surgery at the unit was inaccurate, but added that Leeds “had not submitted good data” to the National Audit used for monitoring the quality of children’s heart surgery.

He will have known that yesterday when the NHS England statement was being written. So why didn’t the statement say so candidly in plain English? Wasn’t that one of the key things that everyone needed to know? Isn’t that what a press statement is for?

First the Chinese whispers, then the dodgy leaks, then the ambiguous embargoed statement (which now seems to have mysteriously disappeared from the internet).

Now this.

It’s a mess.

On your marks … get set … and they’re off! Leeds heart surgery media fiasco, part 3

Last weekend it was a contest of Chinese whispers, Tuesday night a game of dodgy leaks.

This morning the Leeds children’s heart surgery media scrum went head to head in a straight race (nice mixed sporting metaphor) to see who could break an embargo the quickest (and get the story wrong in the process).

I don’t know much about journalism, but I’m told that when you get news material that’s embargoed till a certain time, you wait till the deadline before you publish.

It’s a sort of gentlemen’s agreement that guarantees a level playing field for media outlets, gives them all an equal chance to get a cracking story written, and gives the source of the material some control over what gets said when.

Opaque, but hey

So, late last night a joint statement was sent out to the media by the people attending yesterday’s talks about children’s heart surgery at the Leeds General Infirmary. You can read it here.

Yes, it was opaque and raised as many questions as it answered, but it was the latest from the horse’s mouth – and it was (as you’ll have noted above) sent with an embargo on publication till 0800 this morning.

So, you can imagine them all in their newsrooms starting the morning shift today, like a line-up of prize athletes on their marks, news muscles twitching …

Get set …

And …

Notice the time? 6:03 – a full two hours (oh, alright, 117 minutes) before the embargo was due to be lifted.

Of course, we all know what happens when one of the runners goes early in a race: the competition thinks “shit! if he’s going, I’m going too” and off they sprint.

6:16 Nice try, BBC Look North (“bringing you the latest news from Lincolnshire and East Yorkshire”)

(Eagle-eyed readers will note that in their rush to keep up with the competition, they unfortunately tripped over the statement and got it wrong: 1) the statement didn’t say that surgery “is to resume” and 2) it didn’t say “with immediate effect”)

6:23 The boys and girls at ITV’s local news programme for Yorkshire, Calendar, must have felt in a fix. “Now that it’s on Daybreak, what are we going to look like if we don’t mention it when they come to us for the regional news?”

(Eagle-eyed readers will note … oh, go on, you find the mistake for yourself)

Any Radio 4 listeners out there among theleedscitizen readership? Thought not, but if there were they’d likely be tutting by now about how the above just shows the deplorable standards of ITV and regional broadcasters.

Tut ye not.

6:54 (Radio 4 Today programme)

Leeds General Infirmary says it will re-open its children’s heart surgery unit next week, it’s just been announced this morning. 

(Eagle-eyed readers … yep … them too)

By 7 o’clock it was a mad dash and the devil take the hindmost. BBC Radio Leeds broadcast the news in its bulletin on the hour. Then …

Breaking news? Guys, the story’s been running over an hour.

Did everybody jump the gun?

I haven’t been able to check the BBC Breakfast programme (it’s not available on iPlayer) or Look North, but at least the latter had noble intentions … at 6:37, that is.

What happens when an embargo gets broken? Well, it can be considered a serious breach of trust, I’m told, with the offending media outlet sometimes barred from getting news advances in the future.

Which could mean that there’ll be hardly anyone left to receive the final, final embargoed joint statement when it arrives at the end of the weekend.

As if.

Leeds heart unit comms fiasco – Part 2

It’s water under the bridge now, but last night’s episode of the Leeds children’s heart surgery communications fiasco does merit being logged.

It wasn’t an exact repeat of the Chinese whispers we had at the weekend, but it’s still a pretty good example of how some news gets gathered and spread these days.

It started around 6.45 yesterday (Tuesday) evening when someone – a “source” – left the room where the talks were going on and told the BBC that surgery at the unit was going to resume: final details were being put in place and a press release would be issued within the hour.

(How does that work? Does the ‘source’ ask permission to leave the room?: “Excuse me, chair. OK if I nip out and tell the BBC what’s been decided so far?” Or does she/he take advantage of a break in proceedings, seek out his/her contact at the BBC and spill the beans?)

The ‘news’ that the source passed on duly got published online and broadcast by the BBC on radio and TV.

“We understand, we’ve found out in the last few minutes that children’s heart surgery is to resume with immediate effect.”

One of those BBC reports was heard by one of the local MPs who have been campaigning for the unit to stay open, Stuart Andrew.

Mr Andrew then posted on Facebook and Twitter:

Which sort of adds authenticity to the report, him being an MP and everything.

Enough authenticity at least for ITV’s regional news outfit Calendar to take it seriously and update its online page.

And if further authentication were needed, a second of the campaigning MPs gave corroboration.

There then followed – just as on Sunday night, and just as understandably – a storm of celebration and congratulation on Leeds Twitter.

The only problem was that there’d been no official confirmation. And as far as I could see online the BBC story that everyone was following (knowingly or not) still wasn’t carrying a source for its report on the re-opening.

Then a lone voice piped up (the same lone voice that piped up during Sunday evening’s premature celebrations).

As the hours dragged on, the penny slowly began to drop.

Until it all unravelled with a tweet from NHS England’s head of media relations Roger Davidson.

Cue Twitter storm: “this is madness”, “yet another about-turn”, “totally incompetent”, “they will be held accountable” etc etc

By the time we got to the 22.35 Look North news bulletin, the BBC was saying:

“… we understand that meetings will resume tomorrow to try to resolve these issues but tonight it seems that those agreements we were told were in place earlier in the evening are not at this particular stage now.”

Your guess is as good as mine about what really happened: did the meeting change its mind while the ‘source’ was out of the room?; or is it all just a question of timing and diplomacy? Who knows.

Whatever. Tomorrow it’s all going to be happening again.

What’s the chance that those attending will bear in mind what the NHS England spokesman said last Thursday?:

“It is really important that this review is carried out in a sensible, effective and decisive way. For that to happen it needs to follow a proper and complete process. It cannot be conducted in the media.” (my highlighting)

Leeds children’s heart surgery – anyone for a game of Chinese whispers?

As if the situation weren’t complicated enough, we’ve just had a depressing game of Chinese whispers going on in the media about a possible re-start of child heart surgery at the LGI.

It all started yesterday (Sunday) at 5pm when ITV’s regional news outfit Calendar ran a story saying:

The body running the NHS in England says it hopes that Leeds General infirmary will “shortly be in a position to restart children’s heart surgery secure in the knowledge that everything is okay.”

The report went on to quote a statement from an NHS England spokesperson as saying (bits in bold from me):

“Most of the big failures in NHS care have featured arguments about data. It is just days after the government’s response to the Mid Staffs inquiry where people hesitated for exactly this reason and people suffered…It must be right to put the safety of children first. It was therefore a highly responsible step to suspend the service. We hope that Leeds will shortly be in a position to restart children’s heart surgery secure in the knowledge that everything is okay.”

The Calendar report wasn’t wrong. It’s just that the statement was old.

Hope? Make that ‘likely’ … Likely? Make that “WILL”

It didn’t take long for the report to be picked up on Twitter.

“Great news from NHS England that surgery is likely to re-start at LGI shortly,” said one tweet.

The statement didn’t say that, of course.

Chinese whisper number one.

A whisper that was passed on to campaigning tweeter and local MP Greg Mulholland.

Now, guys, what do you do with Chinese whispers? You compound the initial mistake, add another one and pass it on!

So we get Chinese whispers numbers two and three from Mr Mulholland:

“Great news … that #childrensheartsurgery in #leeds will soon be restarted“

… followed by …

“Confirmation from #NHS England that #Leeds children’s heart unit was safe ALL ALONG ’secure in the knowledge that everything is OK’”

See what he did there, kids? No? Go back up to the original statement and look again.

Lone Twitter voice

As the congratulatory and celebratory tweets poured in, a lone voice (isn’t that the way with Twitter?) suggested to Mr Mulholland that he look again at the NHS statement.

The key quote was no different from what NHS England medical director Sir Bruce Keogh had said on Thursday, Sky news correspondent Gerard Tubb reminded the MP.

Here’s what Keogh had said:

“I hope that Leeds will shortly be in a position to restart children’s heart surgery secure in the knowledge that everything is okay”

Recognise the similarities? Swap “I” for “We” and they’re identical.

As far as I’m aware, the Lib-Dem politician hasn’t acknowledged that he got it wrong.

Hey! It’s only Twitter!

Whisper, whisper

So, come today (Monday), and the Daily Telegraph are looking to freshen up their story.

Whisper, whisper …

Here comes whisper number four.

Under the headline “Hope that Leeds heart unit will re-open soon”, Science correspondent Nick Collins manages to tie an old NHS statement (masquerading as a new statement) to tomorrow’s talks at the hospital.

“The body that oversees the NHS England has said it hopes to restart heart surgery at Leeds General Infirmary soon, ahead of talks with doctors on Tuesday.”

Now, I’m sorry, but doesn’t that make it sound as though NHS England had made the statement ahead of (i.e. because of) the talks?

Which The Telegraph would’ve known wasn’t true. If they’d checked.

Out! Out! Out!

Sir Bruce Keogh

And if the bank holiday Sunday shift at Calendar had bothered to read the Yorkshire Post, they’d have found their “new” statement in its entirety, published 40 hours previously.

Ditto the bank holiday shift at the Telegraph, who’d have found that their key quotes were well over two days old.

Still, not to worry. The story has now moved on. Today (Monday) there’s a different “news” peg for Twitter to bray itself hoarse about.

Out! Out! Out!

What with whispers and distortions, depressingly partisan press coverage and know-all politicians permanently on their high horses, the whole sorry saga is starting to become pretty unedifying.

“It is really important that this review is carried out in a sensible, effective and decisive way,” said the NHS. “For that to happen it needs to follow a proper and complete process. It cannot be conducted in the media.”

Fat chance.