For those trying to justify the £150 million public monies invested in athletics as insignificant by comparing it with the health costs associated with level of obesity in the nation, the private investment in health clubs and with what happens in the United StatesCollege system is entirely spurious and irrelevant.

Football, for example, has massively more money but it's not tax payers’ money and they're not accountable to the wider public. Neither is motor sport or many other sport and leisure related activities.

The MP’s expenses row involved the "trifling" sum of "only" £1.2 million and the Government spent more than that to investigate it and bring those responsible to account. Why? Because it was public money being improperly used and the public expected it to be challenged.

The only proper way to assess value for 12 years of public money being spent by this unelected and unaccountable national governing body is to look at the state of our own sport in this country and what development was promised and expected to be achieved, not JUST at a tiny  elite level but also through the critical and essential development of the grass-roots and the sustainable pool of  talent at every level where clear evidence  from recorded results shows dramatic decline both in standards in depth and participation  particularly after the age of 16.

UK Athletics' original remit was to develop the sport from grass roots-right through to elite but they have instead concentrated purely only on the elite once they have risen, unaided by them, up through the grass roots and in that cause have employed 150 staff, including part time, at a salary cost of over £5 million per year whilst the grass roots [the clubs] that actually produce the sport and its athletes relies on volunteers only and no public funding.

UK Athletics continues to be funded on the success and presumed success of a very small elite group - some of whom have won medals without UK Athletics and lottery support - to give the impression that the whole of the sport from the rest of the elite down is thriving and vibrant, when it fact it isn’t. And the long term prognosis is not good. So something is not right.

At the Beijing Olympics and the Berlin World Championships, look at the number of events with no British representative and further, the number of events with only one out of as possible three? So why does UK Athletics continue to employ those directors of events and event coaches responsible who cannot deliver?

Look at the number of GB athletes who seem to produce season’s best and some personal bests in the qualifying of global championships but then fail to reproduce it when in matters in the semi-final or in a final for the few who make it?

The spending [and largely wasting] of public money on a costly and ineffective administration for an elite few may not matter to the likes of those on the BBC athletics forum who have their own agenda to support UK Athletics but it does to others and the issues - continually advised to the Department for Culture, Media and Sport - won’t go away, much as they would like them to.

John Bicourt was an English record holder and represented Britain in the 3,000m steeplechase at the 1972 and 1976 Olympics. He has coached, advised and managed a number of Olympic and World Championship athletes from Britain, Australia, South African, Kenya and the United States, including medallists and world record holders. He is an elected officer of the Association of British Athletics Clubs