January 11, 2007
Give me back my faith in the Games
Published in the Evening Standard
Is it too early to panic about the Olympics? They are after all, a full five and a half years away. Still, now might be the time to get a bit jittery.
The cue for anxiety came from this week's government warning that it may have to raid the National Lottery's fund for good causes to foot the expanding bill for 2012. According to the Big Lotto Fund, that could imperil 86,000 grants worth a whopping £950m.
Now that's obviously bad news in itself, especially for the young people, disabled and mentally ill whose arts projects, support groups and sports clubs depend on those lottery handouts. Hard to console a disabled thirteen year old whose after-school gym club has been cancelled by telling him that at least the professionals will now have a nice, gleaming stadium in time for 2012.
But it's also troubling for those of us who want the London Olympics to be a roaring success. For this news seems to confirm the pessimism of those who were cynical about 2012 from the start. They always said that the costs would spiral out of control, that hosting the Games would prove to be a wasteful exercise in vanity that would see the capital go wild for two extravagant weeks - only for it to be littered with bloated white elephants, abandoned and unused, for years afterwards, while its coffers were drained for a generation.
When you hear that there's a £900m shortfall that can only be made up by plundering the charity pot - or squeezing more out of London's council tax payers - you worry that those gloomy predictions are coming true. In this particular case, there could be a reasonable solution. If the Treasury were to abolish the 12 per cent tax it currently levies on each Lotto ticket that would release an extra £500 million per year straight away. As for the rest of the shortfall, perhaps those private companies who are going to benefit from the Olympic infrastructure could dig deeper into their pockets.
But there are other worries. Like the report late last year that the planners hadn't allowed for VAT. Or that they had failed to budget for security costs. Here we go, you thought. This is how it begins. As the old joke has it, a billion here, a billion there - and pretty soon you're talking about serious money.
And the doom merchants have multiple precedents on their side. They can point to Britain's woeful history of major infrastructural projects, from the Scottish parliament to Wembley stadium and, of course, the Big Bertha, the Millennium Dome - all of them overshooting their deadlines and massively exceeding their budgets. Or the naysayers can remind us of the Olympic track record, whether it's Montreal, still paying back the debts of the 1976 Games, or Athens, who had to go cap in hand to the European Commission to pay for 2004.
You don't have to be a committed Olympics sceptic to be worried by all this. But nor do you have to jump off a bridge just yet. The planners have a strong case for the defence. First, they insist that this is not amateur hour: London has hired a top class team to build the 2012 site, pulling in the men who built the Sydney Olympic village and Hong Kong airport, among a raft of other major projects. If that means management costs are high, well, better that than paying for a massive overrun five years from now.
Second, they say that what have been cast as mistakes and bungling are nothing of the sort. Sure, the initial estimate in the bid proposal was low: that's because London wanted to win. All the bidding cities put in unrealistic estimates. Nor was the VAT cost somehow forgotten by the Olympic organisers: rather, they say privately, they've always assumed that, so long as they exert enough pressure, the Treasury will be forced to waive it.
As for the precedents, the organisers say they've learned from those mistakes. This project, they say, will be more Arsenal's Emirates stadium, completed on time and on budget, than Wembley. How can they be so sure? "Well, for one thing," says my man on the inside, "we've hired the team who did Arsenal, not Wembley."
Above all, they promise, there will be no white elephants. The Mayor's team say their chief motive for hosting the Games was always the regeneration of East London and that the legacy of 2012 is fixed firmly in the front of their minds. All the time, they promise, they're thinking of the post-Games use of any Olympic site. Thanks to 2012, Stratford will now get new housing, a station and shopping centre. Without the impetus of the Olympics, it would have remained a pipe dream.
I certainly want to side with the optimists, to believe that London can break the Olympic curse and run this enormous enterprise well, leaving a lasting benefit for this city. But optimism isn't enough. The 2012 planners need to be kept under the closest scrutiny. Some crucial decisions are already looming. The main stadium, for example, has still not found a user for after the Games. There was talk of turning it over to a Premiership football team, say West Ham, but it's too late for that now: the design is already too far advanced. If the organisers are not careful, they could encounter the same problem with other potential users, until the London stadium repeats the fate of Sydney's - magnificent for a fortnight, forlorn and forgotten afterwards. The 2012 team need to find a customer for that building, ready to help pay the cost, right now.
The 2012 Games can still be a great success. But we can't just cross our fingers and hope London bucks a very sorry trend. The pulls towards failure are very strong. The Games organisers have to think like the athletes they will be hosting: if they show discipline, concentration and stamina they can win. If they slip, we'll all lose.
Posted on January 11, 2007 02:28 PM