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UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 552-i House of COMMONS MINUTES OF EVIDENCE TAKEN BEFORE CULTURE, MEDIA AND SPORT COMMITTEE
LONDON 2012 OLYMPIC FIRST STEPS
Tuesday 18 October 2005 LORD COE and MR KEITH MILLS MR CRAIG REEDIE, MS SUE CAMPBELL, MR DAVID MOORCROFT and DAME TANNI GREY-THOMPSON
MR TOM WRIGHT, MR BERNARD DONOGHUE and MR JAMES BIDWELL Evidence heard in Public Questions 1 - 103
USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT
Oral Evidence Taken before the Culture, Media and Sport Committee on Tuesday 18 October 2005 Members present Mr John Whittingdale, in the Chair Janet Anderson Mr Nigel Evans Paul Farrelly Mr Mike Hall Alan Keen Rosemary McKenna Adam Price Mr Adrian Sanders Helen Southworth ________________ Memorandum submitted by London Organising Committee for the Olympic Games Examination of Witnesses
Witnesses: Lord Coe, a Member of the House of Lords, Chairman, London 2012 Organising Committee of the Olympic Games and Mr Keith Mills, Deputy Chairman, London 2012 Organising Committee of the Olympic Games, examined. Q1 Chairman: Good morning, everybody. This is the first of what I suspect will be a pretty regular session where we monitor the preparation of the London Olympics. It is really the beginning of what I suspect will be a seven-year inquiry. May I first welcome particularly Lord Coe and Keith Mills from the London 2012 Organising Committee? I think the whole committee would like me, right at the start, once again to congratulate you both and all your team on what was an absolutely magnificent achievement. The fact that we are able to hold this inquiry for the next seven years is fantastic. We look forward to it. May I begin by asking you this? Lord Coe, you set a pretty demanding programme for your first 100 days, which are just about up now. Can you tell us what progress has been made? You started off obviously with interim staff. How are you getting on with recruiting a chief executive and recruiting permanent members of your team? Are you looking to employ people from other countries as well who have had experience of running previous Olympic Games? Lord Coe: For a moment, for the convenience of the committee, may I introduce my immediate team, although not everybody in this room. I think you will be speaking to Keith Mills, Deputy Chairman, during the course of the day. Sitting directly behind me are Mike Lee, our Director of Communications, and John Armstrong, whose aunt I think is known to a number of your committee colleagues, who is one of our political liaison officers. May I immediately echo our thanks. This is the third time that we have been before a CMS select committee: as an applicant city, as a candidate city, and now obviously delighted as a host city. May I thank not only your committee but the cross-party approach that gave us such an important platform in Singapore? It was a very important message that the political leadership of the UK was on board and strengthened our case. We have set a pretty busy target for ourselves over the first 100 days. It was very important during the bid phase, and particularly in Singapore, to be able to demonstrate immediately to the International Olympic Committee that we not only had the first 100 days mapped out and we had a transitional team in place but that we were very aware that other cities had experienced difficulties in the initial implementation phase simply because there were things throughout the bid phase that were not nailed down, like finance planning and land acquisition. We have started the process of the trawl for a chief executive. Keith and I spent much of yesterday on that business. We hope that we will be able to make an announcement by Christmas, with an appointment in place probably in spring time, perhaps a little earlier than that. These are fairly open-ended issues. This is an international trawl. Frankly, this whole project will be managed by people of the highest ability from wherever they come. The Olympic Delivery Authority is the heavy‑lifting arm of this whole project. We are the theatre producers, if you like, as the local organising committee. As you know, the Bill is currently in passage through both Houses and I think at committee stage this morning. The whole process, even the grounding of overhead power cables on the Olympic site, has started. We are up and running. It was very important that that was something we were able to demonstrate very quickly off the back of Singapore. Q2 Helen Southworth: We will be taking evidence later from Visit Britain and Visit London. What role do you think they are going to have in the preparations for the Olympics? In particular, would you want representatives from these organisations to sit on the LOCOG's Board? Lord Coe: I will be very open about this. This is a multi-dimensional project. As the Chairman quite rightly pointed out, this is a seven-year process. The partnership that bore so much fruit throughout the bid phase and allowed us to present the strongest of case, not only on behalf of British sport but as to some of the economic benefits, particularly tourism, the showcasing of London and widening that project to a UK-wide dimension, was very important. London is very important. We will be working very closely with all the tourist authorities throughout the length and breadth of the country to make sure that all these benefits are accrued. Again for the convenience of the committee, we take the UK-wide aspect of this very seriously. We made the point very early on that the Games are inevitably based in one city but that this is a UK-wide project. We have in place now, with the first meeting on 4 November, a Nations and Regions Group chaired by Charles Allen. That is really the vehicle that will broaden throughout the UK. The benefits will, for instance, produce a co-ordinated approach to bring the teams to preparation camps in the UK. Before the Games in 2000, 139 countries based themselves in Australia, a serious contribution not only to the local but also to the national economy. All these groups will be represented within our structures and they play an important role. Q3 Helen Southworth: One of the strengths of the bid was the concept of inspiration for young people in particular. Is that going to be a strong focus? Bringing families along to experience, participate and catch the spirit is going to need facilitators. Lord Coe: Absolutely, and part of our narrative in Singapore was that these were Games for the next generation. We best expressed that on the day of the presentation by taking 30 children from East London, an area that will be most affected by the Games. It was a central theme in our narrative and we want to deliver on that. We want to maximise opportunity for young people, whether it be in sport or the cultural programmes that will inevitably develop alongside the educational programmes as well. Q4 Adam Price: Could I return to the role of the chief executive? The Times was quoted as saying that the advertisement for the role of chief executive specified ruthlessness as a desirable trait. Do you think civil servants should be ruthless? Lord Coe: First of all, I am not sure that The Times did actually use the word "ruthless". Certainly the advertisement did not contain the word "ruthless". It is important to point out that the chief executive is actually not a civil servant. This is an organisation that derives the bulk of its funding, 96 to 97% of it, from the private sector. This will be a chief executive appointed on very strict commercial lines. The interface between the International Olympic Committee and this whole project is through the local organising committee, through the Chairman, Chief Executive and Deputy Chairman, as Keith will be when we get into the complete structure. I think the comparison between him and a civil servant would probably not be that accurate. Mr Mills: I think the advertisement you refer to in The Times was for the chief executive of the ODA, the Olympic Delivery Authority, not the local group. Perhaps this would be helpful to the committee. I presume you do understand the relative roles of the two organisations. It is very important that they work very closely together. Indeed, we will be co-located in one building, but they are very different. One is spending public money on building infrastructure; the other is privately financed and organising the Games. It is important to understand that there is a big difference between the two. Q5 Adam Price: So the advert for the chief executive of the ODA did use the word "ruthless"? Mr Mills: As far as I am aware, it did, yes. Q6 Paul Farrelly: It is not only great that the International Olympic Committee has had the faith to award a major sporting event like that to Britain, given some of the mishaps in the past, but it is also good to see that the committee is praising the start that has been made. In your terms, in the start you have made, what are the key lessons that you have sought to learn from previous Olympics, such as Athens, Sydney and Barcelona, and what are the key mistakes you have sought to avoid? Lord Coe: I think we needed to demonstrate to the International Olympic Committee that this is not a seamless process. Anybody who sits in front of an Olympic Committee and tells them that the Games are a risk-free project is likely to be laughed out of court for their naivety. I think what we did demonstrate was that we understood some of the risk areas and we dealt with those, as I mentioned in my opening remarks, throughout the bid process. There was the need to have the funding package in place, guaranteed and with political support across the board, and the ability, as we had, to get outline planning permission for 500 acres of prime site in London in six months. It may just be that one of the legacies already was being able to move the planning process quite as quickly and with such a partnership really was effective. We had the bulk of the land acquisition in place and the ability to start work the next day, The transitional teams were in place, we understood where a lot of those areas of risk were and we were able if not entirely to eradicate them, to minimise them throughout that process. Mr Mills: That is summed up as a fast start. You need all seven years efficiently to manage an Olympic Games; to build an Olympic Games' infrastructure; to have a very clear organisation that ensures everyone is clear about their roles and responsibilities; and to get the finance in place. In the case of Athens, there was a large delay of two or three years after they won the Games in determining what the organisation was going to be, where the money was going to come from and, as a result, it cost Athens a lot more than it should have done. We have made a very fast start. We have a very clear structure in place. We have the finance in place. We intend to run the London 2012 Organising Committee in the same way as we ran the bid, which was on time and on budget. This afternoon I will be reporting to the Olympic Board that during the bid phase we came in under-budget and we will be returning £1.4 million back. Obviously we have had a successful outcome. We remain focused on what we can do in 2012. Q7 Paul Farrelly: We all saw the race against time in Athens and things being lifted and roofs being left off or put on at the last minute. In terms of the models of organisation from the Olympics that you have seen, which is the best model to follow? Which are the best organised Olympic Games, as far as you are concerned? Lord Coe: In a way, it is very difficult to compare models because all Games are so different in their nature. For Athens, no city probably in the modern era, certainly not since 1952 with Helsinki, has had to come from such a long way back in roads, rails and metro systems. Also, we are a long way ahead if you consider some of the cost difficulties Athens had setting up its security structures. I think probably for odd reasons the answer is Los Angeles in 1984, which had to do so much in a completely different environment, one that was not at that stage very conducive to bidding, and not that many cities wanted the Games. It became a very different story a few years later. Los Angeles introduced a number of marketing and merchandising opportunities. Volunteers were reintroduced to the Olympic scene. In 1948, London actually introduced the concept of volunteers. I suppose, if you look at recent structures, my answer is probably Sydney. We have leant quite heavily on some of their structures, certainly the relationships between the local organising committee and the political structures. In the bid phase, we had some consultancy help from the chief operating officer at the Sydney Games who supplemented the enhanced team and gave us some quite helpful steers that have put us in a good position. Q8 Paul Farrelly: They both made money? Lord Coe: Yes. Q9 Paul Farrelly: Having made such a good start, what are the key priorities now for the next 12 months? Where do you want to be in 12-months' time when you come back to this committee again in this seven-year inquiry? Mr Mills: I hope it is not going to be a seven-year inquiry! That would be very unfortunate. We would be very happy to come back and report to you on a regular basis on our progress. It is very important that the ODA becomes faster. It is important that this Bill gets through Parliament efficiently and quickly because the faster we can get that in place, the faster we can get on with the Olympic part. We are talking about an extremely complex project. I think the last time I looked there were 8,500 items on a Gant chart. This is a very complex organisation. It is really important that in the next 12 months the ODA is up and running as quickly as possible; the land acquisition is as advanced as possible; and a lot of the major infrastructure is in place. That has already started and the electrical cables and some of the steel work and the stuff you do not see under the ground are already happening. Quite separately, the most important thing then is the building of the two organisations. An Olympic Games is as good as the people who run it. Finding a really good senior both for the ODA and for LOCOG is critical and for those individuals to start building their teams. In LOCOG we have between 60 and 70 individuals, and that figure is growing by the week. This is an organisation that will grow to 2,500 people by 2012. It will be as successful as the foundations we build over these next 12 months. The accommodation of people and a fast start for the ODA are probably the two highest priorities. There are two other projects that will kick off and be very important next year. One is the launch of a new identity for the Games. That is some thing that each of the organising committees of an Olympic Games does, usually in the first year or two. We think it is important that is done sooner rather than later. Towards the back end of next year, you can expect a new identity for the Games. Secondly, we will start, indeed have already started and we are in the early stages, to have discussions with the major corporate sponsors, which will fund a large element of the LOCOG costs. Lord Coe: Those are all absolutely essential. There is also the continued successful relationships between the key stakeholders (and many of them will be speaking today), our ability to be transparent and open with people about what we are doing, and the time lines and management of expectations. Communities are not going to wake up in the next two years to nine new venues and Olympic parks. This is a long process and managing expectations but keeping people engaged and enthused and understanding this process is a key part of the communications remit within both the organisations. Q10 Mr Sanders: May I go back to what Keith Mills said about sponsors? Do you have an unfettered right to choose your sponsors? Lord Coe: There are some key controlling influences. We are charged with putting together what we call the local sponsorship. That local sponsorship cannot be at variance with the International Olympic Committee's top sponsors, the key 10 companies such as McDonalds, Visa, Samson's, and Panasonic. So we have to work within the category framework. Those revenues come on-stream in 2008/09. Our task is to match at local level that type of sponsorship which, as I have said, is not at variance and it is not unfettered, but we will be looking at clear categories. We want to make sure that the success of our ability to bring in sponsors and partners at all levels is recognised, at the end of the day, in what we can redistribute amongst the hard-pressed communities in sport. Q11 Mr Sanders: Will you apply any rules to the kinds of sponsors that you would want on board? For example, would you want to be sponsored by an organisation that might be associated with unhealthy eating or binge drinking or some sort of anti-social behaviour, or would you apply a sort of quality test to the sponsors, or is it just an open market because you need as much sponsorship as possible? Lord Coe: No, it is not an open market. For instance, we would not be using tobacco as a sponsor but most of the other categories we would judge on their own merits. We do not have a fixed framework at the moment. We will look at them. It is not an open market. As anyone in the sponsorship market will tell you, the synergy of sponsorship is very important. Where you take from today ultimately determines where you take from in six or seven years' time. We would like the key sponsorships in place before Beijing. This will be done in a pattern. As Keith has already said, we are putting together our own structure to deal with that. We will be appointing a senior marketing team to supplement the existing structures that we have. That is a very important part of it. Mr Mills: To give you some idea of the categories we will be focusing on to start with, those will include the following sectors: banking, telecommunications, automotive and insurance. These sectors are available to us in the UK for local sponsorship. Based on previous Games, those will generate the largest financial commitments. Q12 Janet Anderson: Staying with funding, you are predicting a £100 million operating surplus. Could you tell us how and by whom your anticipated income has been compiled? Do you have a breakdown of how this will be spent? Bearing in mind that your funding streams are going to take some time to come through, what will you do in the meantime? Is it possible to borrow from the Government on the basis that some of your profits will be re‑invested in British sport? Lord Coe: The very nature of the local organising committee means that we have gone into the marketplace. We have our own London Organising Committee funding in place. We did a deal recently with a commercial bank. That is on a simple draw-down basis; it is borrowed against future business. There will not be any requirement within the local organising committee to go to the public purse, but we have very clear time lines, as Keith has already said, about the categories and how and when we want to bring them on board. The overall structure will be developed and is being developed currently. We will have that in place in a few months' time. Already, very good conversations are taking place right across the board. Q13 Janet Anderson: Do you have a breakdown of that? Mr Mills: I would refer you to the candidate files that are in the library for a detailed breakdown. In simple terms, we get a large grant from the IOC. We generate substantial local sponsorship revenues. We generate substantial revenues from ticketing and substantial revenues from merchandising and other forms of sales promotion. Those are the major streams of income. The 2012 prices are not the prices you will see in the candidate file because they were done in 2004. The 2004 price is around £1.5 billion; at 2012, it is close to £2 billion of revenue that will be generated. Our expectation is that we will have a surplus on those revenues of £100 million or more. Lord Coe: That is a rough 60:20:20 distribution - British Sport, British Olympic Association, IOC - in terms of surplus. Q14 Janet Anderson: When do you expect to get the contribution from the IOC? Mr Mills: Some time after 2008. Lord Coe: It is phased for half-way through. Q15 Chairman: Where do broadcasting rights come in? Mr Mills: They come in to the IOC. Q16 Chairman: And you do not benefit? Mr Mills: We do indirectly. They are sold as packages across more than one Games. They sell them sometimes in eight and twelve-year packages and then they are distributed to the organising committees of Beijing, Vancouver and now London. Lord Coe: Those discussions are underway now with the International Olympic Committee. Q17 Mr Evans: You hope to make a profit of £100 million. How confident are you that you will be able to achieve that? I have looked at some of the figures. Everybody thinks Sydney was a great Games but it was not a great financial success to them; they broke even. Poor old Montreal, they are only now finishing paying off the enormous debt that they build up there. How confident are you? What sorts of things are you going to do differently that will make you all this money? Lord Coe: I think our overall estimate of surplus is quite conservative - with a small "c", I hasten to add. For working purposes, we have always been conservative enough to think this was a breakeven figure. I do not have any doubt at all. You ask about Montreal. That was an accounting issue as much as anything. The issue for us is that we are a well‑established, well‑defined, mature market for sport as a country. We think that these figures are certainly do-able. To be honest, certainly in terms of the initial sponsorships, it would be quite nice to be able to buck the trend at that stage in our seven-year development. Yes, we are confident about that. Mr Mills: It might be worth adding that the response we have had since July 6 from the corporate sector in terms of their interest in sporting events is extremely high, so we are optimistic. Q18 Chairman: Of course we were all delighted with July 6 and then we had July 7. One of the costs now that you are going to have to anticipate is the huge extra security that will be involved with these Olympic Games, probably the most that will be spent on security that has ever been spent at any Olympics. Is that all going to come from within that budget? Lord Coe: July 7 was a pretty awful day for everybody. We will review regularly and we will keep under constant review the 17 themes in the candidates' file. Our security plans are robust and they were robust. They were highly commended recently at the end of the evaluation phase in this whole process. The one advantage we have in London, of course, and more broadly in the UK, is that we have the intelligence structures in place; we have a very well-developed approach to policing. If you look at Athens and Sydney and at other sporting events, there has hardly been a sporting event anywhere in the world in the last 10 to 15 years that has not had British policing or some of our security advice at its heart. The unofficial security team in Athens was run by Sir David Veness, a former deputy commissioner in the Met; in Sydney, it was Peter Ryan, a former chief constable in Thames Valley. We are pretty comfortable about that. We think the budget is robust. You are right that security underpins everything we do. That will be the prerequisite. Within the structure, we have the Olympic Security Committee chaired by the Home Secretary with complete and at all times unfettered access to everything we are doing. The Head of security on the local organising committee will sit on that committee. Q19 Chairman: Are you responsible for the cost of all the security within the Games or is the Government going to pick up the tab for that? Lord Coe: Within our own budget, we have set aside a specific security budget and a targeted budget for specific venue security. The broader issue of policing and all the other stuff, of course, does not reside within the local budget. Q20 Chairman: In the worst case scenario you could make a loss. It could happen, could it not? You could go into the red? Lord Coe: I have to say that everything we are doing at the moment tells me that that is unlikely. Q21 Chairman: If it did happen, who picks up the tab? Lord Coe: First of all, I do make this clear: I do not think that will happen. We have a number of structures in place. We have structured this whole process very carefully to avoid that. The issue is a very simple one: the Government have signed the guarantees on this project. They are effectively the lender, the guarantor, of last resort. Q22 Chairman: So the Government will pick up the tab and it will be spread to taxpayers? Lord Coe: It is spread. There are 400 guarantees throughout this whole process. The financial guarantees are very strong and clear, but that is a broad guarantee, and obviously there is government, local and regional as well. Q23 Chairman: The best case scenario is that you will make over £100 million. You have the 60:20:20 split. Did you or somebody else decide on that split? Lord Coe: That would be done throughout the stakeholders. Mr Mills: The percentage is determined by the IOC. Lord Coe: I am sorry but I thought the question was about how we distribute it. Q24 Chairman: Who decided whether it was 60:20:20? Mr Mills: That is an IOC decision. In fact, the formula is that 20% goes to the National Olympic Committee, 20% goes back to the IOC, and the balance can be dealt with as the organising committee and the stakeholders determine. Lord Coe: That final distribution clearly would be determined amongst our stakeholders and the agencies delivering British sport. Q25 Chairman: A number of sporting bodies could be on the receiving end of many millions of pounds, which we would hope - and I do not know if you have had assurances from the Government - would be additional money and not be taken out of any budget they currently give to sporting bodies. Lord Coe: That would be additional, but it is also for the distributing agencies to ensure. Whether that is the split between grass roots and the elite is quite properly the argument still to be had. Q26 Paul Farrelly: Having set a positive tone, I do not want to carry on with a negative tone. To be more precise, when you say the Government is underwriting this and will pick up the tab if there are any losses, is that central government or is it the London council taxpayer as well? Mr Mills: As Seb has mentioned, there is a large number of guarantees based on individual obligations, but over the entire project there is an overriding central government guarantee given by the Chancellor and the Prime Minister that, should there be shortfalls, the Government will be the lender or the funder of last resort. Q27 Paul Farrelly: Some miserable friends of mine in Paris were very glad that London won the Olympics because London would be picking it up on the council tax. Mr Mills: They would say that, would they not! Q28 Paul Farrelly: If the council taxpayer of London is making a contribution towards the Olympic project, why, if you make a surplus, does not the London council taxpayer see a big dividend and you would pay some of the surplus back to them? Mr Mills: On the basis that the stakeholders can determine that, if that is what they so determine, then that will be so. It is for the stakeholders to determine how that surplus is distributed. Lord Coe: The council tax commitment, if in essence it is necessary, is £20 a year for 10 years, capped at 10 years, and it is predicated on an average band D. Q29 Mr Evans: They are going to pay that anyway, are they? Mr Mills: Yes. Lord Coe: That is in the funding formula. Q30 Helen Southworth: You are responsible for the cultural programme? Lord Coe: Yes. Q31 Helen Southworth: Are you excited about this? What does it consist of? Lord Coe: It is very important. It is an increasingly important part of this whole process. It has probably had more importance attached to it throughout this bidding phase than before. Currently, we have a Chair of Culture Education. The whole issue about celebration and the ability through education and cultural programmes the length and breadth of this country to develop an awareness and to bring communities together off the back of an Olympic Games is very important. As for the educational programme throughout this build-up we actually started in a very structured way within the bid phase. We started with a schools' assembly pack, which I think was downloaded by about 39% of secondary schools in the country. Before Singapore, we developed a slightly more complex package, which became a resource package that hacked into Key Stages I, II and III numeracy and literacy, launched by the then Education Secretary at a north London school six months ago. That has worked extremely well. We intend certainly to develop that, both domestically and globally, because part of the Singapore narrative was that this was not simply about getting more young people into sport in the UK and the clear benefits to the UK; we wanted to position London as a city that was able to reach out and spread the Olympic movement globally as well. That is an important concept. We have just advertised for somebody who will deal specifically with the cultural programme and all the things we are able to run off the back of this. That will be central to what we are attempting to do. Q32 Helen Southworth: You have already touched on the role of volunteers. Can you give us a little bit more information about that? You are looking for 70,000 and 60,000 have signed up already. Lord Coe: The figure is roughly 70,000. The good story, even with the awfulness of the day afterwards, is that within the first six or seven days 17,000 people had committed to become volunteers. I think our last count was about 60,000. We are very nearly there. That is not to say that everybody who has applied will be suitable. It is not quite so simple. There are training programmes and structures. If I put that into context, Athens was still trying to re‑energise a volunteer programme five or six months before. I know that because I was recruited to go over and see whether we could help in that way. We are pretty much there on numbers. I want to make sure that there is a regional split as well. It is very important that we recognise that if this is a UK-wide project, our volunteers have to represent the UK. It is very good that we have that many who have pledged names and addresses already. Q33 Helen Southworth: You have anticipated my next question. I was going to ask how you are going to make sure about that. We have a very strong culture of volunteering and so in some ways it is not surprising that so many people have participated already. How are you going to make sure that this is open to people right the way across the country? Somebody who is going to be 18 in 2012 is only going to be 11 now. How are you going to make sure that young people are actually participating? Lord Coe: We have done a number of things already. For instance, in order to help our public awareness campaign, we launched something called 2012 Day, which was on 20 December last year. Any child born on that day has been given a guaranteed role in the opening and closing ceremonies - they will be seven at that point - by using some of our structures like Nations and Regions, some of the current structures we have been using throughout the bid process, and stakeholders who have a very good reach into all these communities. For instance, if you look at Nations and Regions which we are effectively announcing today, chaired by Charles Allen, that represents the nine regions - England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Obviously every region will be asked to nominate a senior representative to serve on this group. Each region has also offered an executive officer to help with these programmes as well. We are well on the way to making sure that that has a proper UK-wide representation. Q34 Helen Southworth: I have been very impressed by some of the work that has been done in higher and further education establishments on events' management and making sure we develop skills to run these sorts of things so that we make sure that when we have the Olympics, we win the bid and do it successfully and also for all the other kinds of events. What are you going to do about that? Lord Coe: That is a very important concept. One of the key issues of legacy for us is the use of facilities and the promotion of self-sustaining communities after this, particularly in East London. The Olympic Institute will become a centre for all the sorts of things you have talked about, not only medical and rehabilitation work with competitors but allowing government bodies access to those types of facilities, developing programmes on the Olympic ethos and event management. We want all those skills effectively under one roof at the Olympic Institute. For me, that is probably one of the most exciting aspects. Q35 Helen Southworth: Are you going to have apprenticeships? Lord Coe: I am not sure at this moment. It is a little early to give you tightly prescriptive structures, but we do want transferable skills. The nature of sustainability in these areas is a very important concept. An Olympic Institute in East London is an important part of the regeneration of that area, but one that has access to people from throughout the UK. Q36 Alan Keen: Mischievously I was thinking that if all my constituents could choose who they shout for, and they are British in the main but they may have been born somewhere else, will they be allowed to shout for whichever nation they want? Where does ticketing fit into the organisation that you have already established? Lord Coe: If I may say so, our ability to make these Games as accessible as possible and as price-sensitive as possible is very much part of your colleague's previous question. I can write to the committee about how we intend to break it down into percentages of the numbers of tickets at various price points. That is very important. I hand over to the ticket expert himself as this is one of the areas in which Keith has been involved for much of his life. Our ability to be able to use state-of-the-art, such as it is, ticketing and targeting ability throughout the Games will be absolutely essential in making sure that people have access at sensible prices to the Games. Mr Mills: The skill in getting our ticketing strategy right is to get that fine balance between raising the revenue that is necessary to fund the Games on the one hand and ensuring that we have full stadiums across the country on the other. I think we have put together a plan that achieves those objectives. It is a delicate balance. There are some very interesting technologies emerging that can achieve that for us. For instance - and this happened in Athens - where events are effectively covered by one ticket, a whole bunch of spectators turn up for the first hockey match to support their team, buy the tickets, and, as soon as their team has competed, they leave and the stadium empties; you have a half-empty stadium for the second game. The new ticketing technologies may well enable us to deal with those sorts of issues and make sure that for every competition there is a full stadium. There are some interesting technological solutions coming through. I think the balance between maximising the revenue, which we have an obligation to do to fund the Games, and ensuring that every stadium is full, is the objective. We have some pretty robust strategies in place to deliver that. Q37 Alan Keen: Obviously the policy you are explaining is right at the top of the organisation. Mr Mills: It is a function of LOCOG. This within the organising committee Q38 Alan Keen: There are going to be many people watching around the word. We do not want them watching anything where the stadium is not completely full, if possible. Will that flexibility be taken right through to when the Games are taking place, that those likely spaces can be filled quickly by volunteers or free tickets to schools and that sort of thing? Presumably that has been taken into account? Mr Mills: That is where you do need technology. What you have to stop is the abuse of ticketing. For those of you who have tried to buy a theatre ticket in London or a ticket to a soccer match, you will know that there is a very active and thriving black market for tickets in every country in the world. Within the constraints of ensuring that there is fair play, with the use of technology (and techniques such as they use at Wimbledon incidentally where somebody leaving Wimbledon deposits their ticket on the way out for somebody to use on the way in) those sorts of things are difficult to do with the current physical ticketing systems they have used in past Games, but there are some interesting electronic solutions coming through at which we will be looking. Lord Coe: This is the ability to allow people to see ticket availability, particularly on the day, and actually target those people that you know want a place on the stadium at the beginning of the day. When something becomes available, you are able to communicate with them. Mr Mills: One of the really exciting things about the Olympic Games in terms of sport in this country is that people will go and see a sport that they would never ever have seen before. When I went to the Games in Athens I saw a sport that I had never seen before. There are some fantastically exciting sports out there; for instance, handball was one that I watched that was just riveting and yet it is never seen in this country. Football will always be full and perhaps some of the other major sports. Lord Coe: What about track and field? Mr Mills: Occasionally people go to see track and field these days as well. There are some great sports that the Games brings to a country which are not traditional sports in that country. That gives particularly young people the opportunity to experience sport they would not have otherwise seen. Q39 Alan Keen: Is it possible to explain the technique for deciding on prices? Seven years is a long time. You are obviously working on engaging inflation. When will you finally decide on the price of tickets? When will they start to be sold? Mr Mills: They will not start to be sold until two years out and we will probably start firming up our ticking pricing three years out. There is a way to go yet. We will also take on the experience from Beijing, which will be a very different marketplace. We will try to take the most recent data before we start fixing the final prices, the final allocations of tickets. We are some way from that that yet. Lord Coe: If I may say, there is also the ability to watch these events on large screens and the use of our parks in London and throughout the UK. We recognise that not everybody is going to be able to get into the stadium as and when they choose but their ability to watch on good definition screens which are accessible is part of that structure as well. Q40 Mr Evans: Clearly, millions of people will want to be part of the Olympic Games and will desperately want to come and visit them. Will your technology allow you to give some concessions, even for events like the opening ceremony, which you will have no problems selling out at all? Are you looking at some concession for people who are perhaps unemployed or other people on low incomes? Mr Mills: We have to be cognisant of European law which states that you cannot discriminate in terms of ticketing. We will be able to put in place programmes for certain categories of individuals. It is possible for organisations to buy tickets and offer them either free or in competitions or as parts of children's programmes, or whatever; that is perfectly OK. Once you have set the pricing of ticketing, you cannot start discriminatory pricing. European law, unfortunately, then gets in the way. Q41 Mr Evans: Clearly that must be made available throughout the world. Mr Mills: Yes. Q42 Mr Evans: Are you going to make fundamental changes between how it was done in Athens and how it will be done in London? Mr Mills: Technology will be the key. Clearly, the internet provides a huge channel for distribution across the world. Some of the techniques that have been used in the past we would like to try to avoid. Historically, ticketing has been done on an allocation basis. In other words, you allocate blocks of tickets around the world. We will be working closely with the IOC to see if we can improve on that. What often happens is that a country or an organisation will take a block of tickets; those tickets will not be sold or they will find their way into the system the wrong way. We need to be aware of that. Q43 Mr Evans: Will you have a policy to prevent a touts' bonanza in 2012? Mr Mills: Yes, absolutely. Lord Coe: There will be roughly 9.5 to 10 million tickets at the time of the Games; that is about 8 million for the Olympic Games and 1 point something for the Paralympics. Just as a small teaser of our thinking, we want roughly half that number to be out in the marketplace at about £20 or perhaps even marginally less. We are very aware that this needs to be a Games, as Keith so rightly said, that meets all our revenue and funding requirements but that is accessible. Q44 Mr Evans: Twenty pounds sounds really good, or whatever price it will be in 2012 with inflation. Mr Mills: That is not in the front row of the opening ceremony. Q45 Mr Evans: I can see that. At £20 people snap them up and put them on eBay. Mr Mills: That is precisely what I was referring to previously. If you can utilise the emerging ticketing technology, it is possible to stop those sorts of things, or at least minimise them. Q46 Mr Evans: Will you be scouring eBay as well to make sure about this? Lord Coe: He may not be doing that personally but I am sure that we will. There are provisions in the Bill to deal with that. Mr Mills: I happen to have run a ticketing company for a number of years. It is an area that I know well. The ingenuity of ticket touts throughout the world is mind-boggling. We will do our best to minimise the slippage. Lord Coe: It is a particular British skill throughout the world! Q47 Adam Price: On the last point about concessionary tickets, if we do have concessionary tickets in most cultural venues, it is because of the volume of tickets involved and it comes within the ambit of anti-discriminatory legislation. Mr Mills: I do not think it is an issue of discrimination but one of making it fair across Europe. I think it is a Europe-wide issue, although also a specific UK issue. Q48 Adam Price: We know that the process of awarding some of the construction contracts has started. Within those areas of expenditure for which you are responsible, the staging elements, when do you think you will be in a position to start to seek tenders for those contracts? Lord Coe: That is done through the Olympic Delivery Authority. Effectively, we are the client here. We want to take those facilities and venues on time and on budget, and we need them at the right point in order to be able to stage test events. That is a very important process at every venue. It is one of the things that did hit the time lines in Athens. We really do want the ability properly to test all these facilities. The procurement process throughout the Olympic Delivery Authority is very much in evidence. Q49 Adam Price: Then what about those elements which are not construction but the staging elements, things like sports equipment, furniture and catering? Lord Coe: Those are overlays. Mr Mills: LOCOG will be adopting a very similar procurement strategy to the ODA but the major procurement in LOCOG comes in the latter years, not in the early years. In the first year or two in the life of LOCOG, the procurement of services is really rather small. It kicks in towards the end of its life. Q50 Adam Price: There has been some discussion already on how to facilitate local, and by that I mean both London and UK firms, that want to secure some of those contracts. What can you do within the bounds of competition law to try and assist local firms? Lord Coe: If they are businesses that are looking to supply the London Organising Committee with the types of services we have just outlined, that will be a very clear procurement process and within the very clear framework of competition policy. Q51 Adam Price: So the major contracts will be advertised widely and invitations to tender across the country? Lord Coe: That will be the case at the specific points we need them. Q52 Adam Price: The Mayor has been quoted as saying that he will use expensive lawyers to adapt the interpretation of European competition law to guarantee the London input; for example, I suppose bring some contracts below the levels at which European competition law applies. That is one possibility. Is that something that you have discussed with the Mayor? Mr Mills: No, we have not discussed that with the Mayor. Lord Coe: We have not done so at this stage. He is appearing before your committee on 1 November. Q53 Adam Price: There is one final issue. The sustainable management system was an important element within your bid. Do you see that as a possible inhibitor, a possible barrier, for small firms in particular in securing contracts? Lord Coe: No, not particularly, but the whole issue of a Games times transport plan is that is effectively a public transport Games where basically the only people travelling in vehicles will be the Olympic family and the national federations. All those cars will be low carbon emissions. We have a waste management system available that really will be state-of-the-art. First of all, I do not think that will be a huge inhibitor and the world will have moved on quite a bit by 2012 anyway. Secondly, this whole issue of sustainability and the environmental theme within the bid document is again one of those areas that is taken a deal more seriously than it has in the past. Mr Mills: In fact, I am addressing a large group on Thursday of all the environmental interests in the country to ensure that we deliver on our promises in our bid phase. Q54 Rosemary McKenna: May I explore the remit of the Nations and Regions Group? I am certainly taking some comfort from the fact that Charles Allen, a fellow Scot, is going to chair that group. I have always supported the bid on the basis that it is a good thing anyway but that the nations and regions will benefit. Could you expand a bit on the Nations and Regions Group and say when they will be in a position to talk to representatives of the various authorities to begin the process of establishing where training camps and facilities, et cetera, will be? Lord Coe: Without labouring my initial point, we have always viewed this at its best as a UK‑wide project. It was always my view that we would not get public support for a London Olympic Games unless we were genuinely able to show that there are UK-wide benefits - the soft and hard legacy. The issues that we want to use the Nations and Regions properly to address are those about sport and the promotion of sport, preparation camps, business opportunities, tourism, culture and volunteering, as well and our ability to have a co-ordinated approach UK-wide to all those things. What we did not want in the bid phase was for nine different regions and our many centres of excellence to start going out at that stage to bid for the Canadian team to go to Sheffield and for Scotland to take the Australians. We wanted to do this in a co-ordinated way post-bid. We did have a Nations and Regions structure, which was chaired by Charles throughout that process. It was very successful in helping us turn around hearts and minds on this whole project. Now there is a very clear area of work. Preparation camps are probably as good an example as anything. I am fond of telling the story: 139 countries based themselves in Australia in the lead-up to the Sydney Games. Belgium was there for very nearly three years. Craig Reedie, our IOC colleague sitting behind us, will tell you about the impact of team GB's presence in Queensland in the lead-up to the Games. Preparation is not an add-on luxury any longer; it is an absolutely essential part of delivering Olympians. Our contributions alone to the local economy were quite sizeable. I think that when the Australians did a final audit of costs and benefits, about $80 million was put into the Australian economy, accounting for teams basing themselves for that period of time. Something like that is important but there needs to be a co-ordinated approach. We have centres of excellence throughout the country. Sport England, for instance, has its EIS in Sheffield. There are academic-based centres at Loughborough, Birmingham and Bath. All these would look to wanting to host these teams, but it is also important, if you have a proper structure for the nations and regions with a proper representative from the regional sports boards or from the RDAs and local businesses involved, that this is a much easier process and a much better structured one. That is probably the best example I can give you, but there is also the ability for businesses on a regional basis to know where their pockets of expertise are and at what times we are going to need those services if something is locally organised. I went to an industrial estate in Belfast on a visit to promote the bid and was introduced to five people in the sports unit who provided effectively the bulk of the refrigeration needs for the Athens Olympic Games. There are pockets of excellence and expertise out there that really should be able to tap into a domestic Games. Q55 Rosemary McKenna: I already have businesses in the constituency which are very much involved in the bid process. I think businesses and local authorities will seize on that. I have certainly been encouraging my local authority to be prepared. One of the things that does concern me is the venues. Will you use venues outside London for specific sports? For example, Strathclyde Park is the best rowing facility in Europe. Lord Coe: We will not be using that. Actually, in so far the Olympic soccer tournament is a UK-wide soccer tournament, on the basis that they are able to get the funding for the new stadium, we will be using the Millennium Stadium, Cardiff; St James's Park, Newcastle; Hampden Park, Scotland; and Windsor Park, Belfast. One of the issues for us at the end of the initial evaluation phase was some of the observations made by the International Olympic Committee that our venues, even within the London area, were a little spread apart, so we had to make some judgments. It is not unusual, of course, for sailing to be outside the host city. Weymouth is our preferred choice; more importantly, it is the International Federation's preferred choice, a world class sailing centre. The sailors amongst us tell me it is the best place to go. One of the issues we did have to look at was rowing, which you have mentioned. Eton Dornay is our world class centre. We looked at the possibility of having rowing a little closer into London. We thought it was unnecessary to build a second world class rowing centre so close to the Olympic Park, so close to the Olympic Games. Our watchword was really excellence without extravagance and it was difficult to justify two world class rowing centres within 25 miles of each other as the crow flies. For instance, we did bring shooting that was at Bisley into the Olympic Park at Woolwich Barracks. We brought fencing from Alexandra Palace back into the Olympic Park. Cycling came from Swanley into a velopark in the Olympic Park. We have made it, from the initial evaluation through to bid presentation, a compact Games. That is important because we do not want athletes being commuters, we want them being competitors. We do not want them spending hours of their day travelling between venues; we want them in and out safely. We are able to say now pretty much 80 per cent of competitors will be within 20 minutes' travel time of their venues and 50 per cent will literally be able to walk five minutes, not that most competitors walk anywhere. Q56 Mr Sanders: I doubt there is a local authority anywhere in the country with councillors who are elected by and accountable to the people which is not asking the question, "What can we do to help make these Games a success? What can we have in our area to take part?" Yet, in every instance they are finding that the decisions that are being taken are being taken by quangos of people who are not accountable to the people. Rosemary has just exampled that as an elected Member of Parliament who wants something to happen in her constituency and yet the decisions over that will be taken by people who are not elected. Is there not a danger there is a democratic deficit within the preparation for the Games and that is something that needs to be looked at? Lord Coe: The bid proposal was not put together by elected politicians, it was put together by a bid team, many of the people you see sitting in here, and we had to make a judgment. First of all the judgment was made by the British Olympic Association back in 1997 that London was the appropriate city to chase the Games. Within our own areas of expertise we had to make a judgment about the vision, how we delivered those Games and why we were doing it. I think on all those counts those decisions were made certainly not by elected politicians, they were made by the people who formed that bid team. That is what the International Olympic Committee accepted in Singapore and the spread of our venues was signed off independently by all the international federations. We will look very closely at every opportunity to broaden the appeal of the London Olympics and the benefits to be had at every level of the community throughout the UK. If you are saying to me are we going to revisit fundamental issues, like a rowing park, a rowing venue moving from Eton Dornay up to Strathclyde, the answer is no. We have those venues in place and we have signed the host city contract and that is now binding. Q57 Mr Sanders: In relation to training facilities, for example, there are communities around the country, either for entire teams or for specific events, where it tends to be the sports body quango that is determining where that is happening, not yourselves, somebody that represents that particular sport is taking the decision. Lord Coe: In fairness, an organisation like Nations and Regions will be represented. It is up to all of those regions to appoint their own representatives who will make the best case for them. Q58 Mr Sanders: The British Yachting Association said that all sailing events must be at Weymouth and it is now saying that all the training teams should also be at Weymouth. Lord Coe: No, they are not saying that at all. Q59 Mr Sanders: That is the message. Lord Coe: They are not saying that at all. Mr Mills: Perhaps if I could just clarify. The process of selection of training camps is an issue for the National Olympic Committees. The 200 National Olympic Committees all over the world will make their own determinations as to where they will base their teams. If there is a strong team from a country that needs to have a rowing facility, for instance, then I am sure Strathclyde would be on the list. Lord Coe: Or Holme Pierrepont, or any of our centres of excellence. Mr Mills: If you are a strong sailing nation then frankly you will base yourself somewhere in the South West because you need to train where you are going to compete. Each town and city around the UK can look at the facilities they have, look at the countries that are coming to the UK in terms of competition and bid for and pitch for the opportunity to go after individual Olympic training - no quangos involved at all. Lord Coe: Some of these sports are less specific. If you are a track and field nation then you might decide on the track and field facilities at Bath, Loughborough, Sheffield or wherever, it is not quite as specific as sailing. The other important issue is that we have a whole raft of facilities that can be used at any one stage in that whole build-up process but it is, as Keith said, for the National Olympic Committees to make that decision. I have to say nobody would have told Craig or Simon Clegg from the British Olympic Association that Narromine was better than Noosa and Noosa better than somewhere on the Queensland coast of Australia, that was a judgment those guys made. Q60 Paul Farrelly: In your very long list of Olympic football venues you quite markedly left out the gleaming halo that is being constructed at this very moment at vast expense in North West London. Why was that? Lord Coe: Semi-finals and final. Q61 Paul Farrelly: The Olympic football final will be held at Wembley? Lord Coe: Semi-finals and final. Q62 Chairman: You have referred to the importance of getting the London Olympic Bill through the House of Commons and Parliament as quickly as possible. One area which has caused perhaps the most controversy is the provisions within the Bill to restrict companies associating with the Games unless they are official sponsors. You may be aware that both the broadcasters and the Advertising Association and the IPA have expressed concern that the Bill appears to be going further than is necessary under the IOC rules. How do you respond to that? Lord Coe: First of all, I think the landscape is important, just to traipse across it for a moment. Keith said a few moments ago about some of the ticketing issues. It is very important that we are able to properly stage and promote the Games within budget and to time, and the revenue and the fund raising implications of that are very clear. We want a landscape that is clean and exclusive and one that is structured. In other words, we want those companies that are prepared to negotiate properly with the local Organising Committee, not only for their own benefit and the attraction of being properly attached to an Olympic Games but also our ability to produce the types of services we have talked about that are redistributed through British sport. That is absolutely essential. As you know, the Committee stage of this Bill is currently underway and some of those clauses and issues are being discussed today. I would question whether or not we are going further than is really necessary. I think this is pretty much a good balance but it is not for me at this moment to judge what might come out of the Committee stage process. I would also say that it is vital that we are able to promote and encourage all sorts of issues surrounding the Games, but our ability to protect those properties that allow us to do what we are charged to do, ie on time, on budget, within the surplus figures that ideally we have talked about, our ability to redistribute, is absolutely essential. We are not going any further than Sydney did. Athens started out with a far looser set of arrangements at the beginning of their process and had to revisit that half way through to tighten them up. We think this is pretty much in balance. What we do want to stop is the potential for ambush marketing which basically will damage those communities that will be looking to the types of distribution off the back of a successful and properly structured sponsorship programme. Q63 Chairman: You say that you are not going further than the provisions of previous Games but, as I understand it, at Sydney there was a ban on the use of the word "Olympics" or association with the word. The Bill goes considerably further than that. For instance, it appears to suggest that a phrase like "Come to London in 2012" might fall foul of the provisions of the Bill and the IPA described it as "extensive, new and largely unnecessary legislation and disproportionate proposals". Clearly you do not accept that but do you accept that you may have gone a bit further than previous Games? Lord Coe: No, I openly say that we want a very tight structure. We really want to make sure that we are in a climate that provides those companies that are going to pay good money to be formally associated as local organising sponsors within all the structures that we have talked about of top sponsorship and rights holders and broadcasting rights the fairest run at this. I am open about that. If you want to come in on budget, on time, if you want to protect the taxpayer, the public purse, we have to do that. Already I can give you very good examples. I sat with our legal team last night discussing this whole issue and they already have a shelf full of cases where people have started to develop attachments to the Olympic Games clearly trying to get round the back door which will damage those communities that we really are seeking to protect. Q64 Chairman: So these provisions may go further than previous Games and they may be tougher than the IOC actually requires but you think that is necessary? Lord Coe: I think it is important and necessary but I would question whether we are in essence going any further than Sydney, and probably in essence no further than Athens once they had revisited those structures half way through their bidding process. I do not know whether you would like to add to that? Mr Mills: Only to say that we listened and learned both from the IOC and from previous Games. The IOC host city contract is fairly specific on what we have to deliver and it is extremely important that in order to meet our targets we are able to demonstrate to advertisers and broadcasters that their rights are protected. Having said all of that, we also need to take a commonsense approach to organisations and individuals that might unwittingly trespass on the regulations and we will, of course, do that. We are not setting out to be a bad boy with a big stick going round hitting everyone. What we are going to do, and have already started to do, is to protect the rights that will provide LOCOG with the revenues necessary to host the Games without cost to the taxpayer, which we think is very important. Chairman: Thank you. Since there are no more questions, can I thank you very much for giving up so much of your time. We look forward to seeing you again in the future. Memorandum submitted by UK Sport Examination of Witnesses
Witnesses: Mr Craig Reedie, former Chairman of British Olympic Association and International Olympic Committee Member; Ms Sue Campbell, Chair, UK Sport; Mr David Moorcroft, Chief Executive, UK Athletics; and Dame Tanni Grey-Thompson, UK Paralympian, examined.
Chairman: Can I welcome our next set of witnesses: Craig Reedie, who is the outgoing Chairman of the BOA and a member of the IOC, Sue Campbell from UK Sport, David Moorcroft from UK Athletics and Dame Tanni Grey-Thompson. I am sorry that we have kept you waiting slightly. Obviously the success of 2012 will depend firstly on our delivering a successful Games but will be measured to some extent also by the success of the British teams and, therefore, that is something that we will be interested in talking to you about. There are a number of questions my colleagues have. Can I ask Mike Hall to kick off. Q65 Mr Hall: There has been some recent discussion about the increase in the number of athletes we will need to field in the 2012 Olympics because we are the host nation. Could you say a few words about how we will achieve that increase in the number of athletes? Could you also say something about the way that we are changing the structures of the way sport is managed with the move from Sport England to UK Sport and the interaction that might have with the governing bodies within sport? Mr Reedie: Can I do the first part. I know that you are seeing the new Chairman of the British Olympic Association and his chief executive, so I suggest that you might have to ask them rather than me as I gave up 12 days ago. The reason for the increase in the size of the team will be that in a number of sports the host nation qualifies as a matter of right and in other sports it does not. Clearly, hosting the Games we would want to have as many British competitors as possible in Team GB in 2012. I think the maximum possible number is 720. That will depend entirely on whether all of the teams that have to qualify actually qualify and whether all of the athletes who have to meet the qualifying standards actually qualify. It is a big jump from the Athens team which from memory was about 375. We are in the hands of the skill of the athletes and the qualifying system in 2012. The rest of it I am happy to pass over to Sue. Ms Campbell: UK Sport is working very closely with the BOA to identify the very important question you have asked, which is how we find these athletes. Clearly that is a sport by sport issue. Having set out with the ambition to put a full and, indeed, successful team on the ground for 2012 we are now in the process of costing that out as we manage the public investment, both Lottery and Exchequer, into the development of both our athletes and our sport to ensure that we can get the most successful Olympic and Paralympic Games ever in 2012. We are starting slightly differently than perhaps we have done in the past which is, rather than starting from a position of aspirational plans, we have started in a slightly more businesslike way looking at the number of athletes we need, the number of medals we need, the number of athletes we need in the medals zone and the number of athletes we need underpinning that in order to drive the level of medal success we corporately want to achieve in both the Olympics and Paralympics. Then we will be allocating those places, if you like, to the more successful sports ensuring we put a full team but investing more money in those sports that can generate greater success. Q66 Mr Hall: Can I just press you on the structure of it. The structural change from Sport England to UK Sport is quite important in terms of the way that sports themselves are actually organised. There is a suggestion from Lord Moynihan and Kate Hoey that we have too many organisational bodies that are available and they have come forward with a solution, not one that I favour myself, that we should radically reduce the number of organisations so that we can have less duplication and more effort going into delivery. Ms Campbell: I think we would all feel that the new structure will give us less duplication. What we now have is Sport England very much focused on community participation and development at a community and local level. UK Sport is very much focused on the development of talent right through to the podium. We have taken the view, based on international research, that it takes around eight years from the identification of an individual through to the podium and we are now responsible for that entire continuum from the identification stage, confirmation of that talent, through to the podium. I have to say the governing bodies' performance directors and the British Paralympic Association have unanimously supported this change and believe that it will give them the structure that will allow us to deliver success in 2012. Q67 Mr Hall: We have a lot of work to do if we look at the World Athletics in 2005 which was not the most remarkable performance of our athletes, was it? Mr Moorcroft: We have a huge amount of work to do. The last two Olympic Games have been very successful for Britain in terms of the total number of medals, both Olympics and Paralympics, in terms of the number of gold medals, but the underpinning number of medals and the number of finalists have not been at the level we would want or that we need in 2012. There are only two nations that consistently get their athletes into at least 50 per cent of finals at the Olympic Games, and they are the USA and Russia in track and field. They are the only two nations that consistently win lots of medals. There are a number of medals that we need to win in athletics to contribute towards the aim of being the fourth overall nation in 2012. One of the key challenges that we have in athletics is to get more people into finals. Currently it is around 25 to 30 per cent of finals in the Olympics and we need to make that 50 per cent. Part of what Sue was referring to, getting more athletes into the medals zone, is crucial. That is as relevant in the Paralympics as it is in the Olympics. Q68 Paul Farrelly: Clearly we are not as big as the United States and we are not yet a Communist country, and with their structures I am sure all the venues in China will be packed to the brim day in and day out, and we have not got the Great Barrier Reef here. We do regularly trail comparably sized countries in Europe: Italy, France and Germany. What are they doing right that we are not? In terms of the organisation of sport and talent spotting, which country would you most like to follow or lead, having done your international research? Mr Reedie: The statistics are that in Athens we were very narrowly behind Italy, we were very narrowly behind France and we have got a little bit to go to beat Germany. I think it is a very reasonable aspiration to be the best country in Europe. The challenge is to beat the Australians because they have invested wisely and very long-term in sport. Their bad time was Montreal in 1976 when they did so badly that they decided they would invest in elite sport, and it took them the thick end of 28 years to the Sydney Games being the catalyst. In fact, there are many similarities in what I hope the governing bodies and UK Sport are going to do. France throws an enormous amount of money at sport but I am not sure that they target it as well as they should. I think we could target our money a little better. We probably need to spend a little bit more time on the quality of our coaches. If we get that right I hope that the natural enthusiasm for Olympic sport will allow the people on my right to deliver what we want. Ms Campbell: I think the answer to your question is that every country has very different strengths. What we have been looking at is what does it take around the individual athlete to produce world class success. We know that there are certain components that you need around the athlete and the first, as Craig quite rightly said, is a world class coach. We are investing now in UK Sport, very much in partnership with the governing bodies, in developing elite home grown coaches because in the past we have had to import many of our Olympic coaches. We have learned a great deal from that but we want to produce home grown world coaches as part of the legacy of the Olympic Games. We want to leave a stronger, better infrastructure for the development of sport post the Games. The Games are not an end for us, they are a staging post to producing a better sporting nation. We believe that once you get the coach and athlete dynamic, it is then about giving that coach and athlete all of the support, whether it is the right facility, the right opportunities in terms of sports, science of sport, medicine and nutritional advice, and packaging that very much around the athlete. That is the approach we have taken and that is the way we have planned out the business case, which is to look at what does it around each athlete to produce the world's best and how do we best focus the investment we have got in sport to make the biggest difference. That is where we are at the moment. Q69 Adam Price: Just on that point of coaches, you are right that there is a certain predominance of foreign coaches, particularly in football but thinking of rowing as well, where there has been some success. I think hockey and gymnastics lost some key coaches last year simply because they were not paid enough, I understand, or that was one of the elements. How will we address that? Okay, growing home grown talent but is there enough money there for the coaching element? Mr Reedie: My answer to that is I hope so. Successful Olympic coaches become very attractive people to National Olympic Committees and their employers all around the world. The fact that we have been successful over the years in attracting a few to come to Britain means that when we are successful they become very attractive to other National Olympic Committees. Mike Spracklen, for example, in rowing coached the Canadians who got the gold medal in Athens. We need to be able to offer these people contracts with sufficient salaries and all the other benefits and enthusiasm to keep them in Britain through 2012 and thereafter. Ms Campbell: I think that is why long-term funding is so critical both for our athletes and our coaching system. What we need is consistency and high quality. We need to be able to give world class coaches world class salaries, but also long-term commitment. It is no good committing for a couple of years and saying, "We will come back to you and tell you whether we can keep you on contract". We really need to have a long-term vision past 2012 so that we can attract world class coaches. Absolutely critical to us, as well as a nation, is using that expertise to develop a whole batch of home grown coaches who are learning from the best in the world that we have left in this country. If you look at the coaching structure in this country, in relation to many other countries internationally it is poor. We still are very, very dependent on volunteers, which is fantastic but there is not that professional infrastructure of coaching that you would find in many of our European competitors. There is no question that that coach/athlete dynamic is critical to performance. Q70 Mr Evans: I was in Australia two years ago and I went to have a look at their Sporting Academy in Canberra and it was brilliant. I saw eight year olds jumping around on bars and various other gymnastic things and it was absolutely tremendous to see. What are we missing as a trick to get our eight and nine year olds involved in sport? Mr Reedie: I am not sure that the British Olympic Association are the right people to answer that question because we concentrate very much at the elite end. We do really need the success of Olympic athletes to encourage lots of young people to get involved in sport. I am afraid we are not an across the board agency. Q71 Mr Evans: Do you think there are some youngsters out there who have got talent but somehow are being missed or not being given the opportunities because of a lack of facilities, for instance? Mr Reedie: I am sure that is true. I am sure it is lack of facilities, lack of organisation in governing bodies, lack of enthusiasm, lack of interest. I hope that we have gone a long way to redress that. One of the most important things in making London an acceptable candidate was to perform extremely well in Sydney. Athens was a bit of a medal disaster if you think back but Sydney was outstanding. Salt Lake in the middle was a curling gold medal which meant that the whole Olympic ethos was in the public eye and it encouraged people. I hope that has encouraged lots of young people to want to take up Olympic sport. We tend to concentrate a little bit in this country on the number of people who take up track and field or swimming. I can take you to Bardowie Loch outside Glasgow where they are teaching kids in dinghies to sail. That might be because we are the best sailing team in the world. It is not a universal statement. It is easy to make but I do not think it is true across all sports. We have got to do better than we have done before. Ms Campbell: I think that is where the Olympic vision and the Olympic role models can really impact on participation. At the other end, what we have all got to be doing is working smarter and better with schools to ensure that we are providing participation opportunities to both able and disabled youngsters both to take part in sport and then to excel in sport. The new National Strategy in England, which is getting our £250 million a year investment, is beginning to create multi-skill clubs, multi-skill academies at primary schools right across the country where youngsters are getting that opportunity to develop real athleticism, real skill and real talent that we can build on because whatever sport we are in we all need athleticism. It is not necessarily athletics but athleticism is the basis of all athletic success. Getting that right at the primary school age is absolutely critical. You are right to point out that we have not done that terribly well in the past but we are beginning to get that right and we are beginning to make a difference there. It is connecting that great vision and excitement that the Olympics creates with a structure at school level that captures that imagination and develops it. Q72 Mr Evans: Considering that some of the athletes who will be taking part in 2012 are still at school, they are young, perhaps 11 or 12 years of age, say they have got a certain skill or talent and it is not being developed, they have not got the right coaching or whatever it happens to be, yet they are desperate to participate in the Olympics, do they get in touch with you and say, "Please, we want assistance?" Are you receiving letters off youngsters now saying, "Please help me"? Ms Campbell: Not directly, but I am sure the governing bodies are. Dave perhaps can talk to you about that. Not wanting to disillusion any 11 year old who has aspirations, there are very few sports where 11 year olds will be in the Olympics in 2012. The average age of Olympic success is 25/26, so if you take off the six years you can see that we are not at 11 years of age, we are looking at 16/17/18 year olds who probably will be getting into the Olympic arena. You will have some exceptions, there is no question, but they will be in the minority. Many of the sports now have systems where they are identifying and nurturing that talent through their club and coaching structures. Mr Moorcroft: It is true to say that following 6 July there was a huge increase in the number of young people who joined sports clubs. Whether that was very objectively gathered information, I do not know, but certainly anecdotally I was at a meeting of chief officers of many sports and they said that there was a huge increase. The challenge we have got from that day onwards is to be certain we have got the capacity to cater for those youngsters who want to now take part in sport. In parallel with developing the athletes, as Sue said, we have got to develop the capacity of coaching, clubs, facilities, the school curriculum and non-school curriculum experience, the link between school and clubs. All of that has to be done in parallel so we build a stronger capacity for sport as well as improving participation and performance levels. Dame Tanni Grey-Thompson: I think one of the huge strengths we have seen in terms of the advent of Lottery funding on the Paralympic side of sport is that it has forced and encouraged inclusion within mainstream governing bodies because if we want to develop a strong Paralympic team it has to come through the mainstream governing bodies, not the myriad of disability groups that were formed 40 years ago because of exclusion and segregation. In terms of Paralympic success, we need to drive that forward through the mainstream governing bodies and make sure that young disabled athletes are members of their local athletics clubs, they do not have to travel long distances and they get access to the good quality coaching that is available in clubs. If we want to drive it forward it is making sure that disabled children within mainstream education actually have physical activity as part of their statement of education, which currently does not happen because sport is not seen as a massive priority. I went through mainstream education, and education will always be seen as the driving force. If you can target that and include PE as part of that you are making massive long-term differences to disabled people's lives. One of the difficulties we have on the Paralympic side is that we will have people competing in London who have not broken their back yet, who have not got a motorbike and have not crashed their car. We have two approaches. It is looking at children with congenital disabilities but also being very smart in how we target people who come through spinal units or go through a traumatic accident. Especially if they have been an athlete, on their route to becoming a successful Paralympian you might be looking at a transfer of two or three years and they can be competing in another sport. Again, it is being smarter and using the governing bodies and being very cost-effective in the way that we promote the development of athletes. Q73 Mr Evans: Are people writing to you, Tanni, because of you being a role model saying, "We need help. We need money. We need coaching"? Dame Tanni Grey-Thompson: I get probably about 20 emails a week saying, "Can I do wheelchair racing? Can I get an entry form for the Paralympics?" which is quite a funny one. It is amazing for me being out and about seeing the number of people who say, "I am going to start running. I am going to do this, I am going to do that", and you look at some people and think "Maybe you will not ever be an Olympian or Paralympian" but winning the Games has inspired people. It is how we can target that inspiration as far as 2012 but also use 2012 to inspire the next generation beyond that to be physically active and healthy and then carry on into elite sport. Mr Moorcroft: In the previously disjointed world of sport in Britain, and athletics was very much part of that, we probably lacked a sense of purpose, the sort of purpose that 2012 has given us. Trying to articulate that, not just in terms of the number of people who stand on the rostrum but how that builds the depth and breadth of sport in the UK is one of the challenges that we all face. The Canberra experience you referred to is a great facility but Australia probably learned that centralising the facility had many disadvantages. I think one of the good things that happened as a consequence of Sue's and other people's work is there is now a network of facilities across the UK and there is a regional drive in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, all the regions of the UK, for identity but also to generate enthusiasm and focus. If we get it right the outcome in 2012 will be pretty exciting. Q74 Rosemary McKenna: Just on that point, I wonder if I can ask a rather specific question. Sports journalists in Scotland have been greatly exercised about who will represent a British football team, how we will achieve a British football team. It would be a great pity if we did not participate in every sport. I know you have said that it is up to the football authorities, quite rightly, but how do you think they could solve this problem? Mr Reedie: I was hoping you might address that question to Lord Moynihan. The International Football Federation wishes that there is a British team in the London Olympic Games. The London Organising Committee clearly wants a British team in the London Olympic Games. I am on record, and have been for years, as saying that I hope it will involve all four home countries. It is up to the Scottish Football Association to make up their minds whether they wish to take part in whatever qualifying system is in place, whether it is four countries playing off or a team with representation. I hope that they do. I do not share their fears and concerns about the future individual identity in FIFA. At the moment I am afraid it overtakes too much of the Olympic debate. I think we in Scotland are much more enthused about the track and field opportunities, the swimming opportunities, rowing and all the rest, but everything comes down to the football team. I hope that it will be resolved and I feel confident that it will. My belief is that most people in this country and most people in Scotland want it to happen as well. I think we should just let the thought develop. I think that an Olympic section of the football competition being played at Hampden would be a very good thing. Q75 Rosemary McKenna: You perhaps did not want the question but I do think it is important to put on record that it is achievable, because I believe that most people want a GB football team with all four nations represented in it, and I hope that the football authorities will be able to come to an agreement. I think it is politics, is it not, with a small 'p'? Mr Reedie: I would be very happy if you could send a transcript of this question to John McBeth and David Taylor of the Scottish Football Association. Rosemary McKenna: I know John McBeth extremely well. Adam Price: According to an opinion poll most people in Scotland want to see a Scottish Olympic team. Q76 Rosemary McKenna: I do not know who they questioned. They are quite happy to be in the Commonwealth Games and do extremely well in those Games. Ms Campbell: Joking apart, I have to say that as UK Sport we spent a very positive and constructive couple of days in Scotland last week and, absolutely rightly, they want to develop a strong Scotland team for the Commonwealth Games, as we would wish them to do. They are absolutely committed as their top line goal to producing athletes who go forward to compete on a UK British level. I feel very confident that we have overcome some of the difficulties that we perhaps once had interpreting what we all were meaning. I think we are on a much, much clearer page. We all want athletes from whatever part of the United Kingdom to achieve the ultimate goal of achieving success in 2012 and we are all joined up with that. As Dave says, 2012 has given us a different kind of focus than perhaps we have had before. Mr Reedie: For the record, for the Committee's assistance I hope, the only way that an entity or a country takes part in the Olympic Games is to be awarded a National Olympic Committee by the International Olympic Committee. The Olympic Charter now says that going forward for a number of years the only people who will be awarded a National Olympic Committee are independent nations recognised by the international community. That is the situation under the rules. The political debate about who represents whom is good knockabout media stuff, in my view, but the reality is that we take part as Great Britain in the Olympic Games and until the political map of this country changes then that fact remains. Q77 Mr Sanders: Is the difficulty more to do with the football authorities rather than the Olympic bodies? Is not a way round this for individual athletes, professional footballers who might qualify for a UK team, to opt into a UK team in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland irrespective of what their national football bodies have to say? Mr Reedie: I do not think, Mr Sanders, I want to speculate on that possibility. It is certainly within the powers of the football authorities and, in fact, the football authorities are talking about it. There is a working group being chaired by David Davies and the Football Association, and I hope that all four nations come together in 2012. Q78 Adam Price: Moving on to the Paralympics, if I may. The 2012 bid rightly focused on strengthening the Paralympic movement as well as emphasising accessibility and inclusivity in facilities for both events. How did you assess the treatment of the Paralympics in the bid? That is a question principally for Tanni. What did this influence have in helping London to win the Games? Dame Tanni Grey-Thompson: I think right from the start the bid was extremely inclusive and for me that was very positive. I would not have been involved with the bid if the Paralympics had been something tagged on at the end. I have spent most of my career trying to promote disability sport and I do not need to be involved in an Olympic bid just to feel like a second class citizen, which is how we have felt at some previous Games. In 1996 we were very much tagged on at the end which had no real value to the Olympics. What has been hugely positive throughout the whole bid is athletes have been involved, both Olympians and Paralympians, and that has made a big difference. The fact that it is going to be run almost as one Games will make a huge difference. In various Games I have been to before the Olympics move out and then ramps are slapped in and it has been very much added on. I think Sydney set a new mark in how Paralympics were perceived and we were all quite surprised with how well Athens went for the Paralympics. I think London is going to move that on yet again. From talking to some of the IOC members and other people involved around the world, they were impressed with how high a profile the Paralympics had. On the final day of presentation it was about winning the Olympics because that was what the IOC members expected to have in the final presentation, but leading up to that the bid was absolutely fantastic and I think all the Paralympians who were involved felt very included and very positive about it, that it was not just something that comes a couple of weeks after and does not have a high profile. Q79 Adam Price: We do fantastically well in the Paralympics in the UK. We came second in Athens and in Sydney compared to tenth in the last Olympic Games. Why are we so strong in the UK in Paralympic events and what more could be done? Dame Tanni Grey-Thompson: I think we have a fantastic history of disabled athletes competing. That is probably because we were one of the first countries to offer sporting opportunities for disabled athletes. Most of the reason for that was after the Second World War the life expectancy of a quadriplegic was two years and a paraplegic was between five and seven years. The real reason sport started was that it was felt there was not enough money to keep the war injured in hospital until they died, so sport was used as a rehabilitation initially. We have got very strong roots where we have come from and a lot of events have been organised in the UK and that has provided a good solid base. What we have seen in the last few years, and what we are going to see in Beijing, is major changes in the number of countries competing and the quality of athletes. If we want to carry on and maintain that level of success, some of it does come down to funding, unfortunately, funding does make a difference, but it is also about inclusion in governing bodies, inclusion within the mainstream structures and making sure we get it right at school level. I think we do have an amazing opportunity to be very, very successful in the future but we have to make sure that work carries on and is happening right now, that we do not just leave it to chance. We cannot sit on our laurels and say we have done well in the past and it is going on. Beijing will be a massive step forward just in terms of the number of Chinese athletes who will be competing. They have huge advantages in terms of the number of people who were injured through industrial incidents and lack of medical care and all sorts of things that we have not really tapped into yet. In the UK we have a huge potential to tap into a lot of sources that we have not yet identified. Ms Campbell: From a funding point of view we are looking for a real step change between now and 2012 in making sure that talent pipeline, if you want to call it that, which is this structured pipeline, is much more clearly defined and much more clearly supported. In the past we have invested in athletes who have arrived with us as opposed to going and finding athletes, potential Paralympians, either in the school system or any other system. One of the things we are doing is working with the British Paralympic Association to ensure that pipeline of talent is much more clearly identified, nurtured and supported over a much longer period than we have had in the past which should make us more competitive in 2012. Q80 Adam Price: You mentioned inclusion in the mainstream. What are sports governing bodies doing to make coaching courses accessible and inclusive for athletes with a disability? Dame Tanni Grey-Thompson: That is has moved on an awful lot over the last few years. The picture across different sports is very different. In some sports it is technically easier to include disabled athletes. In a sport like swimming it is easier to include athletes with disabilities in terms of the way they train in the pool. A lot of governing bodies are now working very hard to make sure that the whole range of services that they offer, not just because of the DDA but because they want to be part of it, are completely inclusive. When you look at athletics, they are working on inclusive coaching programmes. In terms of the officials, there are quite a lot of disabled officials which is probably one of the easiest things to do. It is partly trying to attract disabled people to become coaches but also making sure the coaches who are currently working at a high level understand some of the different needs of disabled athletes. It is very positive to see that the governing bodies are taking that on and moving it forward because I think that is part of the key to success. The most important thing is you have someone who is a very well qualified coach and then the physiological adaptation is very minor. When you are talking about elite level athletes, what we have had in the past is a coach who is maybe not very qualified but is the mother or father or in some way related to a disabled athlete and that is how they get involved in coaching. What we have seen since Atlanta is that does not work. That is the most important thing if we are trying to develop Paralympics, getting highly qualified coaches. Some of the changes that are going on in terms of athletics in terms of inclusion are really positive and it is good to see them happening. I think a lot of sports have taken them on. Mr Moorcroft: Historically, athletics has not been the most inclusive of sports. There are not too many clubs in athletics where they make people feel comfortable or have the facilities to offer for children with disabilities, but that is changing. As Tanni said, through coaching education we have specific modules for athletes with disability. There is an award scheme that we have that has adaptations at every level for athletes with disabilities, as with the new school curriculum programme. One of the crucial things, I think, is looking for the similarities. As a distance athlete, Tanni is an endurance athlete and has the same physical needs, aerobic, anaerobic, as a Kelly Holmes or a Paula Radcliffe, so there is a correlation there. We have athletes who are amputees or who are visually impaired who are runners and they have exactly the same coaching needs with minor adaptations to those who are able bodied. As much as possible, and Tanni and some other colleagues are helping, it is helping able bodied athletes out probably as much, in fact, more than the other way round. Part of the challenge of 2012 from an organisational point of view is to create a seamless Olympics/Paralympics all within sport and all of the Olympic sports are trying to do the same thing. Dame Tanni Grey-Thompson: I think it is partly about using 2012 to break down the barriers that are associated with disability. There has been a big sea change in various generations. People of my parents' generation had a very different view of disability than some of the youngsters who watched Paralympic coverage in Athens. For me, the Paralympics almost has two messages. One is about a link with sport and someone winning and everyone else not winning, but it is also about promoting inclusion and changing young people's attitudes. I think one of the great advantages with the time slots that the Paralympics were shown on TV was you got into that generation of young people, kids who were coming home from school watching disabled people competing and had a different view of disability so they are not going to grow up dragging their kids away from someone with a disability because they might catch something, they just grow up seeing disability as something that is naturally part of society. It is about using 2012 in that way and the development of athletes to make society more inclusive so you have a group of young disabled people growing up also believing that they do have a right to education, they have a right to higher education, a right to work, a right to contribute, not just that they will be there on benefits, which is how a lot of people of my generation grew up because that was how they were treated. Q81 Chairman: Are there any governing bodies that you think could be doing more than they are? Dame Tanni Grey-Thompson: Probably every governing body could be doing more, but in different ways. I think the pattern amongst governing bodies is very difficult. It is difficult between the Olympic and Paralympic split because for many governing bodies the Olympics will naturally have a little bit more priority and within the Paralympics side it is accepting that but making sure that we ensure the services that are delivered are of a high standard. Sometimes there is a difference between being equal and being equitable. There is no reason why the level of service cannot be as high, even though in my lifetime an Olympic medal will always be seen as something that has higher value than a Paralympic medal. Q82 Mr Hall: Tanni, you mentioned the broadcast coverage of the Athens Paralympics but are you happy about the arrangements for the Paralympics in 2012 and the broadcast coverage that we will see there? There were some really fantastic events at Athens that did not get any broadcast coverage at all in the Paralympics. Dame Tanni Grey-Thompson: It is difficult because if you look back to Seoul we had a half an hour programme a few weeks after the Games, which mostly featured some Irish bocce players rather than any British athletes at all. Barcelona was a big sea change in terms of the coverage but it was only through Sydney that there was daily coverage and I think that will improve and Beijing will be another step on. I am not sure we are ever going to get the same number of hours on TV as the Olympics but I think we can do better. What a lot of the media in this country have done, certainly between Sydney and today, is looked at covering more events in between Games, so you would only ever really see Paralympics on TV and not much for another four years but certainly the BBC and the print media are very good at increasing that amount of coverage and it has to be drip fed through each of the years to inspire the next generation of young people. I think the coverage will improve and by 2012 it will be fantastic. Q83 Mr Hall: Can I ask you a completely different question. For athletes who have got disabilities technology is very important. Are we doing enough in the technology field to make sure that our Paralympic athletes have got the very best equipment for when we get to 2012? Dame Tanni Grey-Thompson: I think so. Certainly athletes who are Lottery funded get access to the equipment that they need, and that is funded and supported through the coaching structure, so it is not just an athlete saying, "I fancy that because it looks nice", they have to justify the reason why they need it. Our co-ordination of development of technology has got a lot better in the last couple of years, so instead of seeing other countries as the place to go and buy technology we are spending more time developing it here. That is very positive. Certainly in terms of racing chair technology we are doing a lot more in the UK to make sure we can really push the boundaries and push the rules as far as they are allowed. One of the advantages we have is we have some money to actually buy decent equipment and I think where we are going to see big changes is in some of the African countries and China who did not have access to that equipment who will come through and be able to develop things. That is a challenge for us. Ms Campbell: It is a challenge for both the Paralympics and Olympics. In certain sports, the rowing, the cycling and the sailing, that technological edge is really critical. We are now putting quite a lot of money into working with one of the research councils to look at real innovation in technology, in clothing, in equipment, and particularly looking at those things that will give us those winning margins that are now so tiny, just so small. Q84 Mr Hall: The eights in the rowing. Ms Campbell: Absolutely, it is that whole technological area. I think that is one of the really exciting things where sport and business can work together effectively. Mr Reedie: Chairman, for the purposes of clarity, the host broadcaster for the Olympic Games in 2012 will almost certainly be a company called Olympic Broadcasting Services which is owned and run by the IOC. The Paralympic Games will need their own host broadcaster, and I am absolutely convinced that the BBC will provide those host broadcaster services. Maybe you could seek confirmation of that at some future date. Chairman: We will make a point of doing so. Q85 Paul Farrelly: In 2012 after we have topped the Paralympics table and seen off Germany, France and Italy, what will happen to all of these wonderful facilities that we have built and the great complex in the Lea Valley? Should they remain in public ownership? David, I think your organisation has floated the idea of an Olympic Trust. Mr Moorcroft: The sooner the issue of what entity will manage those facilities is resolved the better. We have already begun discussions with LOCOG in terms of the athletics facilities both for the Games and beyond the Games. When you talk about Olympic Institutes and you know the passion that Seb and others have, I believe it should be held in trust and you will get the best of both worlds in terms of the quality of facilities available for the Games but also the community and elite legacy that is left beyond the Games. Our hope and belief is that a lot of lessons will be learned from the Sydney experience and the Athens experience and a trust will be created post-2012 and those facilities will live for many years beyond it. Q86 Paul Farrelly: A very early lead is going to be taken on this, is it not, because we are setting up the Olympic Delivery Authority and there is talk already of the sorts of Private Finance Initiative contracts that might be signed. These are long and complicated contracts. We have got to take a decision pretty quickly and take a view on how we want to see things develop after 2012. Mr Reedie: As far as the legacy use of the funding after the Games is concerned, each of the facilities that will stay in the Olympic Park has a 25 year business plan already negotiated and agreed. If they require a subsidy, can I suggest when Ken Livingstone, the Mayor of London, comes to see you, you address your comments to him there. Can I also stress from the previous evidence you took from Seb and Keith that as you go through this exercise you bear in mind that there are two very distinct budgets involved here. One is the Organising Committee budget, and that is the bit that Seb and Keith have to look after, and the second is the construction budget, the infrastructure, the stadiums and all the rest of it. In fact, on the running costs of the Montreal Games they made a profit but what did not make a profit were the cost over-runs on facilities and the way they accounted for them in Canada at the time, which is why there has been a long pay-off period. I do urge you to keep that absolutely at the back of your mind as you question the Organising Committee over the next few years. Ms Campbell: Equally, it would be good to remind all of us on a regular basis of the other legacy, which is the legacy for people in sport. It would be very easy to focus on the legacy of the facilities, and that is absolutely right and proper, but we must keep being reminded in sport that this must be much more than a fantastic show in town. This has got to be a transformation of the way sport operates in this country and a chance for us to change for both Olympians and Paralympians, young people, whatever their background and ability, a chance to take part in sport and reach the highest level they want to reach. We have got a big job to do and I think you need to keep asking what is the legacy for people beyond the Olympics, not just the facilities. You need to keep making us address that issue. Q87 Paul Farrelly: I think we should be asking that right now. The playing fields I knocked around on as a kid are now housing estates. There are London boroughs bordering on the Lea Valley, such as Hackney, where kids barely see a blade of glass to play on. Should we be marking the award of the Olympics with an Olympic moratorium on the sale of any more playing fields, for starters? Ms Campbell: I am not going to go into the playing field debate here, you have had more Select Committees on that than I have ever attended. What I can say to you is the investment in school sports that is now happening is making a difference and that is being researched independently. We are seeing significant increases in both primary and secondary age youngsters playing sport both within the curriculum and outside school. Dave was right, the next big thing is we have to connect those effectively into club sport, we have to provide the coaching that allows those kids to progress and then we have to marry it into that elite system so we have got a systemic way of any youngster, no matter where they start from, finding the ladder to success and not groping in the dark for it, which to a large extent is how most of our elite athletes have found their way in many sports. Mr Moorcroft: When I was competing in the 1970s we were fairly embarrassed about the quality of facilities at all levels in the UK. One of the great pluses of Lottery funding, rightly or wrongly, the decision to invest mainly in capital in the first few years, was the huge increase in the quality of indoor facilities across the UK - putting the playing field debate to one side. That creates a really good platform. As Sue said, there is the physical legacy of London that is crucial but there is also a physical and people's legacy around the UK that is of equal significance. Again, one of our collective challenges is to make sure there is the right balance there. Chairman: If there are no more questions, since we have kept our friends from tourism waiting, can I thank you very much indeed for your time this morning. Memorandum submitted by VisitBritain Examination of Witnesses
Witnesses: Mr Tom Wright, Chief Executive and Mr Bernard Donoghue, Head of Corporate Affairs, VisitBritain; Mr James Bidwell, Chief Executive, Visit London, examined.
Chairman: Can I first apologise for having kept you waiting for so long but we did feel very strongly that the tourism aspect of the 2012 Games was something that might be overlooked and we are very keen that it should not be overlooked, therefore we did think it important that you came to talk to us at our first hearing and we hope that we can continue to maintain that dialogue. First of all, welcome, Tom Wright and Bernard Donoghue from VisitBritain and James Bidwell from Visit London. Can I ask Janet Anderson to begin. Q88 Janet Anderson: Thank you, Chairman. Visit Britain reckons that staging the Games in London could add something like £2 billion to the tourist economy, which is obviously very much to be welcomed. Do you think that you should have a position on the Organising Committee board? If not, are there any other structures you would like to put in place to ensure that the tourism aspects of this are properly managed? Mr Wright: I think it is important to recognise that LOCOG and the ODA are predominantly focused on delivering the Games and the LOCOG structure is set up as part of the bid and their relationship with the IOC, so we would not necessarily expect to have a seat at that level. We are very much committed to working in the Nations and Regions Group and working with DCMS on the legacy aspects of the Games per se. One of the key points we want to get over this afternoon is that our main role is to look at the longer term benefits to the visitor economy, and to that end VisitBritain and Visit London are working together looking to set up a tourism business and communications unit to focus on this longer term objective of delivering what is predicted to be the single biggest benefit from the Games itself. Well over 50 per cent of the benefits will come through the visitor economy. We are working on setting that up. We are developing a tourism strategy which understands that the visitor economy cannot use the branding around the Olympics. As Lord Coe explained, that is very much specific to the sponsors. We had to find a parallel position to market Britain globally around the Games itself. Australia, for example, had Australia 2000 Fun and Games. That was the way that their visitor economy was able to position themselves alongside that. Secondly, we are also working on a charter for the businesses themselves who are related to the visitor economy so that we can promote Britain with a good value equation and give consistency of approach to that. We have been heavily developing our Britain Net project, which is an online representation of all the attractions, all the venues, all the different things, all the quality accredited accommodation, so there is a one-stop shop for visitors all over the world to engage and visit Britain around, before and after the Olympics itself. Q89 Janet Anderson: Do you know what has happened in other countries where the Olympics have been staged? What influence have the tourist bodies had there? Mr Wright: We have very much looked at what has happened in Australia and Atlanta. There is a partnership between the national and regional tourism agencies and they come together typically to front the visitor economy elements of it. A good example of where we have to work together is on the media centres for the overseas journalists. There are obviously two types of journalists who will come to this country around the Games. There are the accredited journalists, who are really interested in the sports aspects, but also tens of thousands of unaccredited journalists who are really coming to cover Britain per se. Our challenge during the Games itself is to make it a 17 day - to use the words Australia did - documentary of all of Britain. We have to set up this media centre for the unaccredited journalists and manage that and, during the 36 billion viewer hours that are consumed around the Games, make sure that Britain is projected as this fantastic destination for people to come and visit, not just London. Q90 Janet Anderson: James, could you just comment from a London point of view. Do you feel that you are able to have sufficient influence over the tourism aspects in terms of London? Mr Bidwell: It is very important that London does have a significant influence over how this all plays out. As Visit London, we have worked very closely with the bid team since the inception of the bid and worked alongside them. We ran and organised the Olympic torch run and the concert in The Mall. The opportunity for us is to continue to work with the bid team. Hearing earlier about some of the issues around branding, our objective will be to translate the magic of the Olympic experience into something that we can tangibly use to drive economic benefit for the tourism industry, not only in London but also into the rest of the UK. Q91 Janet Anderson: Do you think there is sufficient reasonably priced accommodation in London for all these new visitors who are going to come? Mr Bidwell: Absolutely. The great thing about London and the tourist industry in London is that there is great breadth of accommodation. You could stay somewhere for £50 in London but you could also stay for £2,000 or £3,000, so there is that breadth that we have. What we have also done is worked with some of the major hotel groups in order to guarantee allocations of rooms for that 2012 period. At the moment there are letters of guarantee for 40,000 hotel rooms in London which will be allocated at reasonable prices, at competitive prices. The other thing that I think is very relevant is that the bid team negotiated those rates via Visit London in advance of the presentations in Singapore so that we knew before we won that we would have those as part of our negotiation, if you like, so there was not that mad rush straight after the winning city was announced. Mr Wright: There are currently 120,000 rooms within a 50km radius of the Games itself and that will grow to 135,000, which is quite a large stock. One interesting fact from the Sydney Olympics was nearly half the visitors were often staying with friends, relatives and family, so there was a big influx. We will see that in London as well. There are so many connections in London. We will see this ability to soak up not just in the hotel rooms but with all the friends and relatives and connections Britain has globally. I think we are pretty well equipped, frankly, to meet any big increase in visitors around the Games itself. Q92 Janet Anderson: Could you just tell us a bit about how you compiled your data on the likely tourism benefits in terms of the additional visitors? Are you looking to Government for additional funding in order to market the Games abroad and at home? Mr Wright: At this stage we have looked at Australia and Atlanta as examples of what we might achieve. Australia had 1.6 million extra visitors between 1997 and 2004 who spent about $3.5 billion. Atlanta claimed they had $2.5 billion of extra revenue from visitors. We have set £2 billion as the bottom threshold of what we can achieve. I believe we can greatly exceed that. One of the reasons we are so enthused and have been a supporter, as have Visit London, from day one of this is that currently 85 per cent of the visitors to Britain - we have 28 million visitors from around the world - come from mainland Europe, the Americas, Australia and Japan, a quite developed market, but in the last few years the real big growth has been in India, China, Malaysia, Thailand and Russia, and we have opened up offices there in the last few years. We see by 2012, if you look at India and China alone with a 2.5 billion population, this opportunity will be enormous and we hope to greatly exceed the two billion. In terms of funding, clearly Visit London and VisitBritain are using their current resourcing to start to set up a joint unit to develop the strategies and the charters and, going longer term, setting up the visitor centres, the press centres, all of those elements. Tourism Australia did receive some extra funding to help set up its Olympic facilities and capabilities, and we will talk to DCMS and work with the LDA and GLA collectively in ensuring we are properly equipped to maximise what is this one-off fantastic opportunity. Q93 Janet Anderson: So you would like some extra money? Mr Wright: We would have to discuss that with our stakeholders. Mr Bidwell: The important thing is to sustain the funding because the Olympic opportunity starts now and we are going to be the host city for 2012, so we need to be levering that opportunity from now. The important thing is to sustain funding up to and after 2012 because there is great evidence that says after the Games is when the city or the country is at the top of the mind and there is a lot of benefit thereafter. As an example, before the 1992 Olympics Barcelona was ranked as the sixteenth most popular city tourist destination in Europe but by 1999 it had risen to number three. I think that is a good example of the very transformational effect that the Olympic Games had on the city. The Sydney brand advanced ten years as a result of the Olympic Games. London is a different city, it is a different place, but we have an amazing momentum which we could really capitalise on with the Olympics and the Paralympics. Q94 Rosemary McKenna: Can I take you outside London. You have a variety of markets to look at and the way different people use their leisure time and holidays. For example, take an American tourist who typically has only two weeks' holidays, who comes to London and we want them to visit the other parts of the UK, what are you doing to make sure that information is going out there and the rest of the UK is going to benefit as much as London? Mr Wright: There are a number of things that we are doing. First of all, our Britain Net project brings together all the different destination sites across Britain into a single website which we can translate, and do translate, into over 40 languages around the world, so you will find it in simplified and modern Chinese, you will find it in Korean, all the different languages around the world. We can use London as a gateway and market Britain globally in those different languages and connect them up to the wonderful variety of venues, accommodation and destinations that we have to offer. The second key thing is the journalists themselves who will be coming pre, during and post the Games. When I talk about this documentary of all of Britain, we will be handling thousands of journalists coming for the Games. If we looked at what happened in Australia, there were an enormous number of journalists who were coming and Australia was quite good at getting its journalists out across the whole of the country, so we would like to get the journalists up to Scotland, to Wales and other parts of the country beyond that. Thirdly, Lord Coe touched on some of these training camps. The Gold Coast in Queensland is a very good example. Because Team GB were based in Queensland, all the British press went out with Team GB and there was massive coverage of Queensland. If you talk to Australia now there is a British market that did not exist going to the Gold Coast now on the back of that market. Again, marketing where we get the different training teams, training camps, all across Britain and cross-marketing those will be an opportunity for us. Mr Donoghue: We already bring in 1,000 overseas journalists every year who go round all of the United Kingdom and give us overseas global coverage. One of the challenges to us, which is a good challenge, is that we are going to be working with all the English RDAs, the Welsh Assembly Government and the Scottish Executive through the Nations and Regions Group that Lord Coe touched on earlier to make sure all of the UK economy benefits from this. As a DCMS agency we have particular funding targets that are set by DCMS for us and they include getting visitors outside of London to benefit the whole of the UK economy. That is certainly something that we will be pursuing right the way through the Games and beyond. Q95 Rosemary McKenna: Are you talking to tourist organisations and companies, for example, to put together packages which will include travel on to other parts of the UK once they have been in London and watched the event that they want to see? Will that all be part of the marketing? Mr Donoghue: Yes, it will be. Within literally 30 seconds of the announcement being made on 6 July our call centres started getting phone calls from around the world saying, "We would like to book our hotel package now". It was quite incredible. One of the things that we are going to be doing, and we have been working on already with the British Hospitality Association amongst others, is putting together an Olympic Charter whereby people can subscribe to the kind of welcome, the kind of hospitality and outreach work that we want to put in place both now and also in London 2012 during the Olympic year. That will be looking at packages both about looking at attending the Games but also getting out around the rest as well using all of the cultural assets that we have in the UK. Those packages are being put together at the moment by individual private sector companies but over the course of the next couple of years we will be shaping what they look like. Q96 Rosemary McKenna: I think that is really important because there is so much that you do not want to miss to make it available to people, to let them make their choice and to make sure that it is there in front of them on offer so that they can do it in the easiest way possible. Transport now is very, very accessible across the UK and it would be a great shame if more remote parts of the country, not just the north of Scotland but the South West, for example, down to Devon and Cornwall, were not in the package. Mr Bidwell: Particularly as 50 per cent of the people who go to Scotland come through London, so there are already those strong links. India has a good affinity with Scotland because a lot of the Bollywood movies are shot up in Scotland and, therefore, we are able to tailor packages and drive people through London off to Scotland and other parts of the country. That is something that Visit London is working very closely on with the VisitBritain offices on an ongoing basis and we will continue to do so. Q97 Alan Keen: I was interested in you grouping India and China as potential visitors. Recently, with a lot of my backbench colleagues, I have spent an awful lot of time with the Home Office Minister trying to find how we can get relatives of my constituents into the country from India. I saw on breakfast TV programmes about a month ago the Chinese saying that they were surprised how much more expensive it was to get a visa to the UK as against France and other countries in Europe. What are you trying to do on this? Mr Wright: The first thing to say, to take India as an example, is we have just opened offices in Mumbai and we are hoping to open offices in Bangalore later this year which is probably our fastest growing, perhaps most important, market for us over the next few years. In spite of the slightly increased visa costs at the beginning of July, visa applications in India are growing very strongly and we estimate that there will be nearly 500,000 visa applications that will come through from that Indian market. The other change in India was over a year ago we only had about 18 direct weekly flights between India and Britain and that is shooting up to over 100 under the new Open Skies Agreement. Likewise, in China we signed Approved Destination Status at the end of January and we brought our first groups from China under the new tourism visas. Clearly these markets will take some years to develop but what the British Government has done on the visas is outsource the offices to a private contractor that gives much better coverage across China and India. Before, effectively you had to go to three cities in India to get your visas but now 12 cities have their own visa offices. We are still offering 24 hour turnaround on those visas and we are pretty well respected compared to other countries in terms of the visa that we offer and as we move forward to biometrics, which is part of the increase in cost of visas, we will give an even better service to people coming to this country, so there is some transition going on. I would say that the demand of interest to come to Britain, particularly from India, is still very strong. Q98 Alan Keen: Should I redirect my constituents to send their relatives to your offices rather than the High Commission? It is an enormous problem. It seems a complete contradiction. I want to get as many people in from India for the Olympics because we have such a large community from India, and Pakistan as well. Have you talked to the Home Office? How do you get people in? On what grounds do you give them visas if they cannot get them for genuine family visits? Mr Wright: Clearly visas is not our primary remit. I cannot really talk for UK visas in that respect. All I can say is that the number of visas being issued in India is going up significantly and we are seeing a big increase in overall visitors from India, and that is both because there are so many strong business connections now between Indian and Britain - Britain is the third biggest investor in India and India is the sixth biggest investor in Britain - and we are seeing a lot more people visiting the over one million people with Indian backgrounds living here, and we are also seeing a big increase in people coming for holidays. UK visas clearly have to manage that process. At the moment we are seeing big increases in visitors from those countries. Q99 Mr Evans: Following on from what Janet said earlier, the day after we had the terrorist attack there were stories in newspapers the following day that hotels had jacked up all of their prices to cash in on the fact that people could not get home. Are you saying that the charter that you have now got with the hotels will prevent that from happening, that they are not going to put up their prices? Mr Wright: We would like to work with the industry to offer a charter to visitors that gives them some reassurance about the pricing around that. I cannot give you specifics of that because we are just having those discussions and it is still some way off. As James said, it is worth recognising that we have got guaranteed rates for 25,000 hotel rooms already as part of the Olympic bid per se. I believe that the hotel industry will want to be responsible. One of the lessons from some of the other Olympics is do not over-hype it. There is a great danger that you can over-hype it and put off visitors by over-hyping the Games. We want to work with the industry in a long-term managed positioning for visitors to this country. There is a difference with London. We have 28 million visitors to this country, half are coming to London and London is just about the single strongest destination in the world, so it is well used to coping with massive numbers of visitors per se and, therefore, I do not think it will be as big an issue as perhaps in other Olympic Games in terms of that over-hyping and ramping of prices around that. We will work very closely with the hospitality industry to manage that. Mr Bidwell: Visit London has a number of partners from the hotel industry. We have several 100 partners as part of Visit London who also help fund us and we have an ongoing relationship with those people. We worked with them on behalf of the bid team to negotiate the rooms for the Olympic moment, if you like. We can impact and influence them through providing them access to the marketing campaigns and some of the other activities. From the main breadth of the industry we will have influence. There are always one or two who will take advantage but we are as good as any in terms of setting it up and the fact we are thinking about it now and putting those plans into place should help. Q100 Mr Evans: We want visitors to come to Britain after the Olympics as well and if there is a reputation that within the two weeks people were ripped off then all the good work that you are doing now in the build-up to the Olympics could be undone afterwards. Mr Donoghue: Just on those media stories, we and the British Hospitality Association, which is the trade association for hotels in this country, undertook an inquiry and we found no evidence that hotels had put up their prices or ripped off customers in the wake of the bombings on 7 July. We put out a public call where if people had been affected by this they should tell us and we received no evidence whatsoever. In fact, we did receive a lot of evidence that some hotels, the Hilton for example, discounted a number of their rooms on the night. I am afraid as far as we are concerned that was pure media speculation and inaccurate reporting. Q101 Mr Evans: You heard the evidence earlier on about the Olympic Bill that is going to go before the House. Are you happy that you are going to be able to do all you can to associate yourselves with the Olympics without encroaching upon the Olympic Act as it will be? Mr Bidwell: Our experience in working with the London 2012 team up to the bid puts us in very good stead to continue those relationships. What we heard were quite severe guidelines, which are absolutely understandable because the objective is not to allow people to abuse them. The conversations that I have had to date with Keith and his team are around "We will be able to come and work together to create branding that will be applicable to the tourism industry". That is why, working very closely with VisitBritain, Visit London can be a link between LOCOG and the London tourism industry and the British tourism industry in order to translate that relationship that is very important and that openness from London 2012 and the team there towards what we are doing, because we have to have some brand assets to leverage through our marketing and to really take that halo effect out of sport, which is clearly very important, into culture, heritage and all the other areas. Mr Wright: We will have to develop, just as Australia did with their 2000 Fun and Games, a branding for Britain that encapsulates the Games which does not directly use the Olympics, because that is defined for the sponsors. We will have to work very closely with LOCOG in that whole capacity. I do think the key message from our perspective of the visitor economy is the recognition that the visitor economy is not managed predominantly within the LOCOG and ODA set-ups and, therefore, we need to have the remit and support to get on with delivering the visitor legacy which starts now and leads right up to 2012 and beyond. While other agencies are much more focused on "How do we deliver on the day?", we are working to a very different brief. Mr Bidwell: And the fact that we are here today is very encouraging. Q102 Rosemary McKenna: Can I ask a bit about the training and skills that are going to be absolutely crucial. There are constant complaints that there are not enough highly qualified, highly skilled staff in the tourism industry, particularly in hotels and various other provisions. Who should have the principal concern about that? Who should be the lead body in addressing that, the Skills Council, the Government, yourselves or a combination? Mr Wright: The good news is that we do now have a sector Skills Council for the hospitality and leisure sector called People First. That has been recently established. There are 2.1 million people, if not more, employed in leisure and hospitality. There is also quite a high turnover of staff in that sector. We are very much working with and supporting People First and we have to develop the managerial skills to ensure that the broader staff are delivering high service and high quality experiences. The second aspect of this is the quality agenda. Visit Britain works with Visit Scotland, the Welsh Tourist Board and the AA in accrediting accommodation across Britain. We give them the star ratings for the different styles of accommodation. In 2006 we will move towards what is called quality accredited only, so as an organisation we will only recognise and market globally accommodation that is properly accredited. We are looking for support from Government itself to only use quality accredited accommodation when it is booking rooms, meetings or travelling in its own right. We need to gear up towards the Olympics and use it as a sort of meeting point where we can really project a high quality product with a highly skilled workforce behind it. Q103 Rosemary McKenna: That is one of the issues, is it not, that you have a target there so it should encourage the industry to say that it is worthwhile investing in our young people so they will be the very best when the opportunity arises. There is a real opportunity, as someone who has got a real interest in skills and training, to say to young people that it is a good industry to be involved in and to get them into the business. Mr Donoghue: Absolutely. One of the groups that we have already touched on this morning is the volunteers and we would consider those 70,000 volunteers to be 70,000 tourism ambassadors. One of the things that we are already proposing to DCMS and also to LOCOG is that the hospitality industry should be involved in their training so that they get the welcome and hospitality training that happened in Australia to very great effect and great success, and they become the tourism guides, the ambassadors, which will mean that people who come to the Games will want to come back. One of the great statistics for us is of the number of people who went to the Sydney Games, 88 per cent said that they wanted to come back to Sydney within the next three years. Of course the Games are important in terms of the tourism that is derived during that year and those 17 days but it is the legacy that is the absolute key here and that is the most important bit. Chairman: Gentlemen, thank you very much indeed. I am sorry we have kept you so long but it has been very helpful. |