News | John Smith's Stadium update

The last year has challenged all of us in business in ways that we could never have imagined. The stadium has suffered as much as most, given that our two main occupations are entertaining crowds in professional sport and hosting large scale conferences and events. Just like everyone else, we have had to be innovative: we’ve had to get used to the demands of staging closed door matches and a small, but steady flow, of largely training based non match day activity. However, this has also meant developing relationships with the NHS, to fight back against Covid.

We now have two very important programs on site with the NHS:

In December we entered into a Lease with the NHS to be one of, at that point 14, plasma collection centres in England and that work is on going;

We then entered into a separate License with the NHS and became one of the 50 large scale vaccination centres spread across England and vaccination started at the beginning of February. The whole of the Chadwick Lawrence Stand concourse has been converted into a public vaccination centre; this is now vaccinating up to 1,000 people a week, and in due course, that will reach 2,000 people a week.

As a community stadium it is great to have been able to be part of the solution within our local community, but it is important to say that without the total support of both Huddersfield Town and Huddersfield Giants, we would not have been able to move as far and as fast as the NHS needed. I would also like to thank all of our staff who have worked tirelessly to make this happen. This was acknowledged in a Teams call we had earlier this month, with Stephen Barclay, Chief Secretary to the Treasury, focusing on how the public and private sectors are working together at this time.

We will get back to normality, so don’t forget us for your conference, dinner and event needs when we do!