Despite Bradford MDC paying £400,000 to the Tour de France organisers, the city is not on the route of the 2014 event.
"Did anyone know the council had paid £400,000 for the Tour not to come to the city?" asked Bradford West MP George Galloway, revealing for the first time just how much Bradford had paid. "Did anyone know that the council paid anything? It seems to be the great unknown. While the Tour will visit most of the other great cities in Yorkshire it has given ours the bodyswerve and won't come within 10 miles. The people of Bradford city, the shops, hotels and restaurants are largely going to miss out on what will be a huge influx of thousands of visitors and millions of pounds spent."
The MP continued: "I want to know who took the decision to pay out the cash and what conditions, if any, were imposed on it. I want to know who negotiated with the organisers of the route for the two Yorkshire stages and why the city was by-passed when others like Leeds and Sheffield were not. It's fine that the riders should swoop through Bronte country but it's as if there's a 10-mile exclusion zone round the city. Is the council ashamed of it? This is a scandal which I hope is still not too late to remedy.
"I am calling on council leader Dave Green to make a full accounting to the public about the negotiations that went on and an explanation about why his council did not wish to, or could not deliver, the inclusion of the city on the route. Are they dunderheads? And I am calling on Green to campaign, even at this late stage, for the city to be put on the Tour map. I warmly welcomed Yorkshire being included in the 2014 Tour and I applauded those who achieved it. The £400,000 would be money well spent if it achieved tangible and substantial benefits in tourism and revenues for the City of Bradford, but it seems clear that the Tour caravan and the hundreds of thousands who follow it will spend their money elsewhere."