Examination of Witnesses (Questions 260-279)
RT HON
RICHARD CABORN
MP AND MR
PAUL OLDFIELD
7 DECEMBER 2005
Q260 Chairman: I am talking about
the Commonwealth Games and to what extent the British Government
will support Scotland's bid to bring the Commonwealth Games since
you have successfully brought the World Student Games to Sheffield.
What advice can you give?
Mr Caborn: I hope we can do better
on the debts than we did in Sheffield on that, but we will park
that one on one side. We had our sports cabinet meeting in Cardiff,
where all the sport's ministers and the sports bodies were there,
Sport England, sportscotland and so on, and it was chaired
by my Secretary of State, Tessa Jowell. All of us gave full support
to Patricia there that we were supporting that bid. One of the
things we want to do with 2012 is we are looking now at running,
what we call in our terms, a school Olympics which we want to
run every year starting next year, building each year a few more
disciplines as we move towards 2011. We would like to have the
finals, one in Scotland, on in Wales, on in Northern Ireland,
one in the North and one in the Midlands, finishing in 2011 with
those games in the facilities that will have been completed ready
for 2012. After a discussion with some of your colleagues in Scotland,
we thought it would be best to have the final in Scotland next
year simply because it would give a launch pad for the Commonwealth
Games. We are still working that through and hope to make some
announcements early in the New Year. Again, it is by way of illustration
that we will do everything we can to make sure that Scotland is
seen as a major bidder for those Commonwealth Games. I will be
working with your Minister in Melbourne at the Commonwealth Games
at the beginning of next year.
Q261 Chairman: What advice would
you give Patricia Ferguson so that she can ensure that Scotland
secures the maximum benefits from the Games so we can take full
advantage of the opportunities?
Mr Caborn: I think there are a
number of things we have learned. Before we decided to make the
bid for the Olympics, my Secretary of State and I travelled around
the world talking to a lot of people in a lot of cities that had
run the Olympics. They were very generous with the advice they
were giving. Whilst they did not wash their dirty linen in public,
they told us what some of the major pitfalls were. I think we
have learned an immense amount from that which we will hopefully
use in developing the company structures which we have got now.
Basically there are three sets of skills you need: a skill set
to win the bid; a skill set to deliver the infrastructure and
a skill set to deliver the Games itself. That is why the structure
of the companies are as they are. Also to make sure that you get
all the levers of power that you need to build major infrastructures,
it needs CPOs, planning, a robust budget and also a good delivery
mechanism in a company structure. I believe, again, we have delivered
all that. What is important—one of the things that many
have failed on—is the legacy. For example, in Sydney they
told us very clearly that they did not factor the legacy into
their thinking as early as they believed they ought to have done.
That is why they are left with an Olympic park which is costing
them something round about ten million pounds a year just to service.
That is not servicing the debt, that is just servicing the facilities.
They would not have built another arena because the downtown arena
in Sydney would have done. They had no anchor tenant for the main
stadium, which is now a major revenue problem to them, a drain
on revenue. I think building the legacy in is incredibly important.
That is why we have put so much emphasis on making sure that every
piece of real estate we build has an anchor tenant or a use after
it. Indeed, we want to make sure that the legacy of competition
and the legacy of the human capital—I was talking a little
earlier on volunteering—is built into a very strong legacy
theme. Finally on that, I think what we did in Manchester shows
that it can be done, even against a bit of adverse publicity sometimes.
The stadium in Manchester was designed such that it would be an
athletics track for six to eight weeks and then be ripped up and
sunk by two metres to then turn into a football stadium. You cannot
do that after you have designed it, it has to be built in at the
design stage. The role that stadium has played in regeneration
of the east side of Manchester is considerable and it is not a
revenue drain on the local authority either now. Both financially
and also in terms of regeneration that was successful. I think
that is the approach you have got to have if you are going to
maximise the Commonwealth Games or, indeed, the Olympic Games.
Q262 Danny Alexander If I can follow
up on this point about the legacy. The things you described there
under the heading of the legacy have largely been physical infrastructure
based, if you like, making sure the physical infrastructure that
is created for the Olympics can then be made proper use of afterwards.
Clearly, there is not going to be new physical infrastructure
in Scotland, so, from the point of view of this Committee's report,
I am interested to know what other aspects you see as being part
of the legacy that might well be more applicable to Scotland?
Mr Caborn: Obviously on the question
of volunteering, straightaway you have got a great opportunity
there to be able to bring people in to give them that type of
training, and that is a legacy. The competition structures that
you would develop around that could give sustainable competition
structures as well, particularly as far as amateur sport is concerned.
It is how you develop the cultural aspects of it because I think
that is a big window, particularly up in Scotland with its great
history and great opportunity to be able to exploit tourism and
the cultural side of that very effectively, so there is a whole
range. Again, in Manchester what was very usefully done was to
bring all the industries together. Sir Digby Jones was very proactive
in this from the CBI. They had a Friends of Manchester and Friends
of the North West. You get a lot of visitors to the Games in the
nature of the Commonwealth and the Olympics and they come to the
city and come to the area and you could set up business meetings
as well in areas that they would want to go and see. There was
a lot of business activity around the Games as well. The legacy
of that is to be seen because they have now set up a lot of contacts
which are now, as it were, bearing fruit in the economy of the
North West. There are a lot of opportunities there and it is how
you use them. The catalyst to do good is the Games itself.
Q263 Chairman: Scottish Local Authorities
invest some £200 million per annum in sports and contribute
£140 million to economic development. Can you remind the
Committee how much the UK Government makes available for both
sport and economic development in Scotland?
Mr Caborn: I do not know that
figure and I am sure my officials do not know that figure. I am
not going to start guessing.
Q264 Chairman: There is no problem;
you can pass on this information to us.
Mr Caborn: I shall pass on that
and I will make sure that my officials write to you and give you
that information. [2]
Q265 Mr Davidson: In terms of the preparation
for the Games, obviously there needs to be funding made available
to allow Britain's elite athletes to prepare for that. What is
the mechanism for additional funding to be made available?
Mr Caborn: UK Sport has got the
responsibility for elite development in the whole of the United
Kingdom. You probably know that in the recent past we have repositioned
UK Sport to make sure that all the revenue streams that go into
elite sport are going directly now into UK Sport. We have brought
in the English Institute for Sport under the umbrella of UK Sport
and we have also given them responsibility for what they call
the talented athlete scholarship scheme. They have got all the
funding mechanisms under their wing, as it were. They have been
working with Peter Keen, who is one of the employees of UK Sport,
on a model of what the investment has got to be and where it has
got to be to deliver on the elite side, both in terms of the Olympics
and also the wider elite as well. Mr Davidson, in the Olympics
there are 26 disciplines, I have got responsibility for 130 sports,
so we have always got to be a little careful that when we say
we are just going to invest in the elite, we do not just invest
in the 26 sports. For example, cricket, rugby—I know it
is a great love of yours—both League and Union, are not
Olympic sports, neither is golf, which is another Scottish pastime,
or netball, so there are some big sports which are not Olympic
sports. When we start talking about elite, we have got to make
sure that they are not at the expense of that. We are hoping to
have a meeting with the Treasury early next year with Sue Campbell
and Peter Keen, along with myself and my colleague, John Healey,
to work through what is necessary to put into place for 2012.
Q266 Mr Davidson: Should we be concerned
that there was no mention in the Chancellor's Pre-Budget Review
of enhanced financing for elite sport?
Mr Caborn: The PBR is not necessarily
a place where you would make that, it is the big architecture
of the Budget, as you would know, Mr Davidson, and in relative
terms this is small. What I can assure you is that there will
be a dialogue with UK Sport, my Department and the officials at
Treasury in the early part of next year when we will be discussing
the very issues you are talking about.
Q267 Danny Alexander: You answered
the first part of my question, which was that obviously if we
are looking to develop champions for the Olympics in 2012 then,
firstly, that decision has to be made early to get that funding
in place. Secondly, from a Scottish point of view, it is important
to recognise that champions of 2012 could come from any part of
the United Kingdom, so that funding is available to help develop
those potential champions and ensure that whether they live in
Aviemore or anywhere else across the country those individuals
can get the support they need to fulfil their full potential.
Mr Caborn: Absolutely, and that
is why UK Sport is the funding body. Obviously you get individuals,
where it could be a Scot on their own, but there are many Scots
who are in teams with English, Welsh and Northern Irish; that
is a UK team. The funding of elite is through UK Sport through
to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. They meet together collectively
as well. Your Director of Sport and a representative of sportscotland
are on UK Sport.
Q268 Mr McGovern: Do you believe
that central Government has a role to play in trying to persuade
overseas' Olympic associations to set up their training camps
in economically deprived or fragile areas? If so, how difficult
would you perceive that to be?
Mr Caborn: The first thing you
have got to answer is what are the facilities you have got. That
is why we are asking the devolveds and the regions to do an audit,
effectively, of the facilities they have got. You have got some
of the big teams. If you take the big teams like China, Canada
or Australia, who will probably add to 26 disciplines of the Olympics,
if they want to hold their camps together then they will want
facilities that can cater for the vast majority of those disciplines.
You may then get a country which has just got a group of runners.
Kenya is a very specialist team and they will be looking around
for very specialist conditions for their particular athletes.
First of all, I think you set off from the basis of what they
will be doing; they will be looking at the facilities that are
available for them and then making those decisions. What we want
to try and do is help all the devolveds and the regions to make
sure their facilities are in place. It might need some investment
in some of these areas as well, that is another thing that LOCOG
is looking at very seriously, to make sure we have got good quality
facilities for those training camps and, again, that will be part
of the legacy as well.
Q269 Mr McGovern: Who do you believe
should be taking a lead in trying to attract teams to set up the
training camps? Do you believe it should be the Government, the
Scottish Executive, local authorities, all of these or someone
else entirely?
Mr Caborn: All of them. There
is already a committee that is meeting in Scotland looking at
this, and that is Scottish Enterprise, the sports bodies and the
Scottish Executive, as I understand.
Mr Oldfield: The London Organising
Committee and the BOA are committed to producing a guide to the
facilities that exist in the UK and the places where training
camps could potentially take place. The Scottish Executive, Scottish
Enterprise and sportscotland are a part of that, but the
Organising Committee and the BOA between them will produce this
guide that will then go to other visiting teams and National Olympic
Committees so they are informed about where they can site their
training camps.
Q270 Mr McGovern: Do you know who
the representative of Scotland is on the Nations and Regions?
Mr Oldfield: Julia Bracewell is
chair of sportscotland.
Mr McGovern: Yes, we have met her.
Q271 Mr MacNeil: I wonder if you
can quantify in any way—I know it is early days—the
financial benefits to Scotland of the London Olympics, mindful
in a way that the clue might be in the name of the London Olympics
and it might not be possible to give us as big a benefit as if
the Olympics were in Scotland. Just a point of clarification as
well, will there be any loss of lottery money going into Scotland
over the next number of years before the Olympics?
Mr Caborn: On the last point,
there should not be any loss of lottery money, it may be repositioned
because obviously you well know that we set up the Olympic Lottery,
which is doing incredibly well. £4 million had already been
banked, and I looked at the figures last night and it was just
over five million; it has been incredibly successful. The displacement
from the others has not been as great as was originally anticipated.
I would not have thought there would be any loss at all.
Q272 Mr MacNeil: You are saying there
will be no loss of lottery money to Scotland at all?
Mr Caborn: No. What I am saying,
though, and I am making it very clear what I am saying, is with
the rest of the country we are taking £1.5 billion, which
is the lottery draw that will go to funding the Games across the
piece, as it were.
Q273 Mr MacNeil: Year on year we
should still see the same spend in Scotland?
Mr Caborn: The spend in Scotland
in terms of what we are doing on elite athletes, of that £1.5
billion, £350 million—I think it is—is for athletes
and that will be spent in Scotland as it will be anywhere else
in the country. It is not easy, so I do not want to give an absolutely
categorical guarantee on that because we do not know the patterns
that will emerge. In terms of the advantages, it is difficult
to quantify. The other day I was saying to a committee that I
went to look at Terminal 5 and the impact that has had on the
British economy is something round about 7,000 people employed
on the site, but there are some tens of thousands employed off
site. The supply chain into that is complex. In the North East
they have got a whole shipyard working on some of the modules
that they need for T5. Hundreds of these are being produced, in
fact basically taking over fabrication, welding and good quality
engineering. What we want to see is the supply chain into the
South East because labour is quite expensive in the South East,
as we know some would argue it is somewhat overheated, therefore
if they can manufacture off site and bring on, as they have done
very, very successfully in T5, that is a project that is just
under £5 billion, probably the biggest single construction
programme in Europe at the moment. They are guaranteeing it will
come in on time and, indeed, under price. I think if we can get
that type of skill and that type of approach to what, again, is
a massive construction project here, then all parts of the United
Kingdom will gain from that. Then you look at things like tourism
and the cultural festival. I do not know what Edinburgh will be
doing as it runs up to 2012, whether they will be doing all sorts
of other things around the Edinburgh Festival, but all those are
great opportunities where there could be quite significant gains.
Q274 Mr MacNeil: It is hard to pin
down the definitive benefits, it is really potential opportunities
that we can highlight at the moment.
Mr Caborn: Absolutely. That is
why, through the Nations and Regions, we do not want this to become
a race to the bottom, a beggar my neighbour, we want to make sure
that we are driving from the highest common factor, not the lowest
common denominator. We want to make sure that everybody gets the
advantage. I think Scotland is extremely well placed to do that.
Q275 Mr Walker: Minister, the Chairman
wrote a letter to Alistair Darling, Secretary of State for Scotland,
expressing this Committee's concerns that the Olympics may become
a jamboree for the rich, famous and powerful and exclude people
from poorer backgrounds.[3]
We were wondering what measures you think could be put in place
to ensure, perhaps, people from inner city Glasgow and the regions
get a chance to attend the Olympics, bearing in mind that some
of these people are coming from households with incomes of less
than £6,000 a year.
Mr Caborn: First of all, we are
not London centric in that sense. We are embarking upon making
sure that the spirit of the Olympics, particularly in this country,
is used effectively. That is why we want to run the schools games,
where we want to involve as many young people as possible competing
in sports, to be able to have the regional finals, in your case
your national finals, and then to compete at a UK level every
year and moving that round the country with the finals. As I say,
we would like to start that in Scotland next year, for the reasons
I have said about the Commonwealth, and then move to Cardiff,
Northern Ireland, the North and the Midlands. We also want to
start the cultural festival. The two things that would give us,
if we run the games in that way—I think we will be able
to do that—is firstly to start training the volunteers on
that and, secondly, it will leave us with a legacy of probably
one of the best competition structures for schools and young people
anywhere in the world. I think we will be looking at the cultural
festival, which we want to set up from 2007 onward. The BBC is
very interested in the school sports and they are working with
us. I think we will have an arrangement with them whereby a lot
of these school sports activities could well be shown on television
regionally, or in your case nationally, and then also for the
finals to be run on national television as well. On the cultural
side of it, it is quite interesting because if we could show the
best of the devolveds and the regions to the world as we move
into 2012, it is going to create great opportunities on music,
dance and poetry. Again, the BBC is looking at this with us as
to whether it can run some type of interactive appreciation—they
are doing it now successfully on all sorts of programmes—and
show some of the early stage. That, I believe, will be an involvement
and not four weeks of sport in London. This is about the spirit
of the Olympics being used very pro-actively to engage young people.
The narrative we used at the Olympics was how we could use the
spirit of the Olympic movement to reconnect young people back
into sport through the five rings. School sports, the cultural
festival, volunteering are all part of people being involved through
the Olympic ideals. It is a big sporting spectacular for four
or five weeks but it goes wider than that and that is how we can
engage a lot of those people, the millions who will not be able
to go to London.
Q276 Mr Walker: What I am interested
in is the young people who have no treats in their life. My kids
will go because I am well off. Angus's kids will go because he
is well off but there are people growing up in extremely strained
circumstances, young people, and I feel unless the government
establish some sort of endowment fund or somebody reaches into
their pocket there are going to be whole swathes of people who
are under-privileged who can watch it on television but they will
not get to be in the stadium and feel the excitement. That is
what I am trying to get at. We need to democratise it.
Mr Caborn: We are not down to
that detail. I hear what you say. I have no doubt this will be
a recommendation in your Committee report. It is something we
will give serious consideration to. You are right. We do not want
it to pass people by. We want as many people to get that experience
as possible. It is inspiring, particularly for young people in
a disadvantaged area, and it could change their lives. Where we
can make that available by whatever means, we will do that. I
will make sure it is raised in the appropriate committees.
Q277 Chairman: Committee members
are concerned and many of their constituents are extremely concerned.
Everybody celebrates in this country, rich, poor, powerful and
famous, but if we do not give some special concessions to the
deprived community and deprived young people, how can we reconnect
them with support so that they feel they are taking part in the
Olympics?
Mr Caborn: I do not know. We have
not discussed that. It is an area that we will have to discuss
in the future. I will raise it particularly with Seb Coe and the
LOCOG Committee because they have the responsibility for ticketing
and the running of the Games. Ticket prices for events will be
fair and affordable. Tickets will be available to every range.
A total of 9.6 million tickets will be available for the Olympics
and Paralympic Games. Of these, 4.3 million tickets will cost
£20 or less, 6.2 million will be £30 or less and 7.6
million will be £50 or less. Whether that has been useful
to this discussion I do not know but it is something that we will
have to look at if we are going to get to some of those deprived
areas that you are talking about where it can be inspirational
for those kids.
Q278 Mr Davidson: The background
to this is that we are conscious that football and rugby have
been taken over by corporate boxes and ya-yas. Very few real people
get into them. It is not only a point about ticket prices because
people from my area also have the issues of travelling in a way
that people from exactly the same social background in London
will not have. Do you see that as being your responsibility centrally
to deal with or is that something we ought to be addressing to
the Scottish Executive?
Mr Caborn: Not necessarily the
Scottish Executive, but we are setting up in each of the regions
a full time coordinator for all the areas we have been talking
about and that is exploiting in terms of supply chains, tourism
and all that, but this is an area that ought to be given some
consideration as well. If there are demands there, it ought to
be discussed at the Scottish level to quantify what the problem
is and, if necessary, to bring it back through the Nations and
Regions Committee. That is the one that will inform the decision
makers either on the board or the two others and that is the way
that I would put it back into the system. It will not just be
a problem in Scotland. Travelling from the north west and the
north east is equally expensive.
Q279 Chairman: It is not only the
problem of transportation; there is the problem of accommodation
here as well.
Mr Caborn: Look at all the MPs'
flats then.
2 See Ev 72 Back
3
See Ev 74 Back
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