Sport UK, the UK funding agency is to examine if the UK could host the Games for the first time since London 2012.

along with potential cost, socio-economic benefit and any bid’s chance of success.

“For too long we have been told the Olympics is simply too big and too important to be hosted in the north”, Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy has told BBC Sport.

“Not any more. It’s time the Olympics came north and we showed what we can offer to the world. We know that we can pull off the most incredible, not just bid, but Olympics. So we’re kick-starting that with a phase-one study about the investment, the resources, the infrastructure, the transport that we’re going to need.”

Andrew Moger, NMC’s CEO said: ‘The news sector embraced London 2012 with unprecedented levels of organisational collaboration and commitment by publishers, news agencies and their newsrooms and news and sports journalists’.

He added: ‘The news media made a significant contribution to the success of 2012, and continue to do so in relation to subsequent Games, through independent reporting including before such event on topics of funding and social impacts, but also through the Olympics and Paralympics and on legacy issues’.

Moger concluded: ‘Being able to freely report on the Games, especially once they have begun, requires authorities including governments and the International Olympic Committee to factor in the importance of fully enabling the news operations and newsgathering in their various modern forms’.

The findings of UK Sport’s study will determine whether to proceed with a more detailed “technical feasibility study”, with a final decision on any bid resting with the British Olympic Association (BOA).

Nandy was asked by the BBC’s Dan Roan which stadium could form the centrepiece of any northern Olympic bid, she said, “the study will look at identifying all of the potential sites that we’re going to need…there are particular challenges around some of the athletics facilities, but actually these are things that any government should be addressing anyway, and an Olympic bid gives us the opportunity to do that.”

“The reality of the current financial context is that we want to work with what infrastructure already exists”, said Nandy. “There is good infrastructure across the north of England, but it needs to be upgraded…You only need to look at some of the amazing infrastructure that we’re building, like the new Everton stadium, to see exactly what we can do here.”

“We’ve got to prove to them that we can do this in the north of England” said Nandy. “I believe that we can, though, and we’re deadly serious about making it happen.”