Sacked Dome chief speaks out

Jennie Page with Tony Blair before things went sour

The chief executive sacked from the Millennium Dome has questioned the wisdom of giving schoolchildren free visits to the attraction.

Jennie Page was speaking in public about the Dome for the first time since she was forced to leave her job in February.

The more children going with schools, the fewer families go, so you lose adults which was a key part of the business plan

Jennie Page

Allowing one million schoolchildren free trips to the site in Greenwich, south east London, could have affected visitor numbers, she told the Royal Society for Arts in London.

The plan had meant "quite a lot of changes" to the capital investment plans at the Dome, she said.

Organisers "couldn't do some things" as a result, she added.

"The more children going with schools, the fewer families go, so you lose adults which was a key part of the business plan," she said.

The free visits were agreed by the board of the New Millennium Experience Company (NMEC) following a specific government request.

But Ms Page said she was not going to point out any one problem and the Dome had suffered from an accumulation of things.

"We don't know whether or not the number of people coming to the Dome is affected by the fact that they can't take cars there," she said.

Frustration

She criticised the Faith Zone, saying it sat on too many fences and many people therefore found it unsatisfactory.

And she said in the early days the project had to continue even though it was not clear whether it would win government approval.

"For the press and politicians, the resulting ambiguities and imprecision were obviously frustrating."

Asked why the Dome had not been built to the "glory and future of Britain", she said nobody had wanted to pay for that - "neither the Millennium Commission nor the sponsors".

Ms Page said that in late 1996 a consultant had predicted that if the Dome survived, she "as chief executive of a time-limited political project, was likely to end up walking out, sacked, dead or mad".

She went on: "I reflected on those words every day of the succeeding three years until they came true. At least, a quarter of them came true."

Record attendance

Attendance figures for the Dome were the best ever in April, with 579,333 people visting the attraction.

This beats the previous best monthly figure achieved in February when 569,538 people visited.

The Easter break and the school holidays, together with the introduction of extended opening hours, will have helped push numbers to an all-time high during the month.

Despite the increase the Dome will have to attract around one million visitors a month for the rest of the year if organisers are to reach their break-even figure of 10 million admission-paying tourists.