Examination of Witnesses (Questions 119-188)
HUGH ROBERTSON MP AND DAVID GOLDSTONE
21 DECEMBER 2010
Chair: Good morning. This is the second
session of the Committee looking, as part of our annual review,
at the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games. I would like
to welcome Hugh Robertson, the Minister for Sport. It is, I think,
your first appearance before the Committee.
Hugh Robertson: It is indeed.
Q119 Chair: I would also like
to welcome David Goldstone from the Government Olympic Executive.
This is not your first appearance before the Committee.
We are rather reduced in number, but we will
press ahead. Perhaps I could begin. As part of the Comprehensive
Spending Review, there was a reduction in the ODA budget of £27
million. Are you confident that that will not have any serious
impact on preparations for the Games and that it can be accommodated
without having to make reductions anywhere?
Hugh Robertson: I'm absolutely
confident. I think it was important, when we were going into this
process, to strike the right balance. Given the scale of the deficit
that we were tackling across Government, I think it would have
sent out the wrong message to exempt the Olympics completely.
That might have made it unpopular in the public's eye. I think
it was very important for us, as a new Government, to show that
we were on top of the budget. I have the finance director here,
so I would like to record my thanks to him for a series of excellent
briefings over five years in opposition, without which that process
would not have been concluded so successfully.
We went through the budget item by item and
line by line, and we came out at the end with a series of savings
that we thought were realistic and affordable. I am glad to say
that they have been delivered without impacting on the project
as a whole.
Q120 Chair: We're going to
come on to look at the contingency in more detail, but it is the
case that the budget has a very large contingency. Does this just
mean that the contingency is slightly smaller than it was before?
Hugh Robertson: No is the short
answer. We're very alive to that possibility. The approach that
we took was to really try to identify all the potential risks
and then score them off against the contingency. That was the
process that drove all of that. In terms of the individual savings
that were identified first as part of the in-year savings, then
as part of the Comprehensive Spending Review, we looked for very
specific items and scored those savings off against them.
Q121 Chair: So is it possible
to break the £27 million down into specific savings?
David Goldstone: Yes.
Hugh Robertson: Yes.
I'll do that. There was £11 million off the International
Broadcast Centre and the Main Press Centre (IBC/MPC)final cost,
£13 million off ODA security, and the remainder off the velodrome
and temporary basketball arena.
Q122 Chair: How were the savings
on those particular projects identified?
Hugh Robertson: Through work with
the ODA—a process that David went through, working with
the ODA on each and every item. Indeed, that process was replicated
across all the other budget areas.
David Goldstone: It's worth saying,
over the six months or so since the new Administration came in,
there have been two pots of savings taken out of the Olympic budget.
There was the £27 million in May, which was made up as the
Minister said. The thing that drove those savings was procurement
and efficiency gains in the way those projects were being delivered.
There wasn't any reduction in scope, so in terms of your question
about the impact on delivery, no, they were all savings that could
be achieved in the way in which the projects were being delivered
rather than what was actually being delivered.
During the spending review process, there was
a further £20 million of savings, which came from three specific
items. Some came from the stadium wrap that's been publicly reported
separately. Some came from efficiency on the way the project in
Eton Manor at the north end of the Olympic Park was being delivered.
Again, that's not a reduction in scope, just in procurement and
efficiency of the delivery. Also, there were savings across some
of the transport projects, which we're going to publish more details
on early next year but where, again, we can find ways in which
the required scope can be delivered without impacting on the quality.
Hugh Robertson: It's fair to say
we were very keen, if we could, to identify some savings, not
only because it's right that the Olympics should play its part
in the deficit reduction, but because of the message it would
have sent out had we not found those savings.
Q123 Dr Coffey: In terms of
the contingency budget, I understand that about £0.829 billion
has been allocated out of a total of £2.2 billion. Who will
be responsible for authorising the release of the rest of those
funds and on what basis?
Hugh Robertson: The process we
went through at the CSR time was to look at what remained in the
contingency pot—broadly speaking, around about £1 billion—and
then to score that off against a series of risks. We tried to
bottom out as part of this process every conceivable risk that
we could find in the project, and then score that off against
the remainder of the contingency. The result of that was that
we had a pot left of half a billion pounds; £238 million
of that is the security contingency held against, unexpected at
this stage, but possible rises in the security state, and the
remainder held in a more general contingency. On the release,
we inside the Department hold £50 million of that and the
remainder is held under the lock of the Cabinet Committee that
now controls the release of the money.
Dr Coffey: The Cabinet Committee?
Hugh Robertson: Yes.
David Goldstone: All bar that
£50 million is actually financed and technically held within
the Treasury reserve. In terms of release, there would not only
be a process within the Department and the project, but we would
have to get Treasury agreement to a release from the Treasury
reserve, to access all bar the £50 million that the Minister
referred to.
Hugh Robertson: That is activated
through the Cabinet Committee.
Q124 Dr Coffey: I appreciate
that the Cabinet Committee is in control of that, but after the
Games, if the contingency hasn't been used, how will that be shared
between the main contributors—the Government, perhaps the
lottery, the Mayor, the councils?
Hugh Robertson: That's a very
good question. There are memoranda of understanding that governs
all this. The original one was signed around the same time as
the budget was rearranged in March 2007, so that agreement comes
into play. Broadly speaking, however—indeed was part of
the CSR negotiation—it made a lot of sense to leave us with
some contingency, because having the contingency there has allowed
us to manage the risk much more effectively as the project has
gone through. The Treasury, or the public purse, will in the end
get the money back and it will be allocated to Departments in
the normal way.
Q125 Dr Coffey: Okay. So the
memorandum of understanding at the time was clear that it will
stay with the Government?
Hugh Robertson: Yes.
Q126 Chair: Originally, the
LDA was going to get the first chunk.
Hugh Robertson: There is a minor
confusion here. There is the actual contingency and then there
is the lottery money. The extra lottery grant is what the Chairman
is referring to. The extra lottery grant is covered by the memorandum
of understanding. The main reserve is covered by the process that
I just described.
Q127 Chair:
So it is still the case that the lottery should get some money
back, eventually?
Hugh Robertson: When the lottery
is repaid, yes, depending on property values and all the other
land values on the Park.
Q128 Dr Coffey:
I'll just skip forward. You just mentioned about the security
being given an extra £238 million of contingency, but I understand
that the Home Secretary recently announced that she was confident
that security would be delivered for £425 million rather
than the £600 million originally envisaged. I'm just trying
to understand that, given what you've just said, and I'm also
surprised that the threat level seems to be better.
Hugh Robertson: Again, that's
a very good question. There isn't an extra £238 million that
has suddenly appeared from nowhere. The March 2007 budget settlement
had £600 million scored off against wider policing and an
extra £238 million of security contingency. That was held
in the budget, if you're an expert in these things, that was additional
to the £8.1 billion for the main construction.
I must say that I was slightly surprised, if
I'm honest, by the coverage of the security announcement last
week, because what the Home Secretary was actually saying, as
a result of Dame Pauline Neville-Jones's review of security, was
that at this particular moment she foresaw the need to use only
£475 million of that £600 million. The full £600
million remains available, however, and the £238 million
of contingency is still held in the half a billion pounds-worth
of contingency that's held under the lock.
To be completely honest with you, the slightly
curious thing that everyone has missed is that as part of the
security review we had identified that it makes little sense for
separate pots of security funding to be held across the budget.
There was an element of security held inside the LOCOG budget.
It makes no sense in security-control terms to have separate people
doing separate bits of security; from 10 years in the army, I
know that that's normally how you have the disaster. So, we transferred
that tranche of funding into the main LOCOG budget. So yes, only
£475 million of the £600 million is needed, but there
is also £280 million-worth of venue security that is being
transferred into the main LOCOG budget.
Q129 Dr Coffey: So you're
confident that security's not being compromised in any way because
of budgets?
Hugh Robertson: I'm absolutely
100% confident that security is not being compromised. This comes
back to something that I always tell people: I remember when I
was a young soldier in Londonderry 22 years ago, Gerry Adams said,
rather chillingly, "The thing you have to remember is that
the British Army has to be lucky every time; we only have to be
lucky once." The security threat is very real and very serious,
and it is growing with the addition of dissident republican terrorism,
but in as much as we can work that out at the moment, we are confident
today that we have both the systems and the money to keep these
Games secure.
Dr Coffey: Thank you.
Q130 Chair:
You broke down the £27 million, and I think that you said
that one of the three areas that you had identified as having
scope for savings was the media centre. Is that correct?
Hugh Robertson: The IBC/MPC, yes.
Q131 Chair: Yet that is one of the
two areas in which there has been a significant overspend in the
capital programme. An extra £700 million has had to be put
into the media centre and the Olympic Village. How are you going
to find savings with the media centre when it's already over budget?
Hugh Robertson: I think that there's
a misapprehension here.
David Goldstone: If you compare
it with the original baseline budget for the media centre you
are right. It started off at £220 million, which was effectively
a public sector contribution to what would otherwise have been
a private developer deal. The total cost estimate at that time
was £380 million, and the difference of £160 million
was assumed to come from a private sector developer.
You might remember that about two years ago
the decision was taken, at the height of the credit crunch and
with the property market as it was, that we couldn't deliver a
good value-for-money deal for the media centre through a private
developer deal; in the same way, we subsequently made the same
decision on the Village. Since that time, the media centre has
been fully publicly funded. The budget that was set at that time
was about £355 million, so what we've been measuring against
since then is that £355 million budget. Contingency was released
to go from £220 million up to £355 million, and since
then very good progress has been made and savings have been achieved,
so that the forecast now is around £300 million. The savings
we referred to a few moments ago were part of that reduction from
the £355 million set in January 2009 down to about £300
million as a forecast now, but you are right: compared with the
original estimate it is an increase, because we lost the private
developer.
Q132 Chair: It's not an increase
in the cost; it is simply an increase to the Government cost.
David Goldstone: Correct. There's
been a reduction in cost, but we have lost the private developer
contribution. Of course, the public sector now owns that asset,
which would otherwise have been owned by the private sector.
Q133 Chair: We will explore
in due course what you intend to do with it.
You recently said in a statement that the Olympic
budget is going to remain unchanged, but it will "be reconfigured
from April 2011 to make provisions for operational requirements".
Does that mean that some bits are going down and others are going
up?
Hugh Robertson: One always hopes
that things are going down rather than up. Reconfiguration was
a word that I used. One of the things that I have started doing
as the Minister responsible is, with David, fronting up the financial
reports at the same time as we make a report to Parliament. When
we arrived in May, one of the things I identified was that the
nature of the project was changing from a largely construction-based
project to a much more operational one—many of the challenges
that were lying ahead of us at that stage were around operational
issues, such as ticketing, volunteering, and all the things that
you need to run the Games—and that the nature of the contingency
that stood behind the project as a whole would need to change
or be reconfigured.
As part of the Comprehensive Spending Review
settlement, we were able to move the contingency fund from one
that stood purely behind the construction elements of the project
to one that now stands behind the project more broadly, so we
have that half a billion pounds, approximately, of contingency
left, which stands behind the project as a whole and not merely
behind the construction.
David Goldstone: We announced
as part of the spending review settlement that we had earmarked
funding for some specific operational pressures that had not previously
been funded. The Minister mentioned venue security—that
was one, but also there were the costs of managing spectators
between transport hubs and the venues, and some of the burdens
falling on boroughs. We have found provision in this contingency
for those needs as reflecting the operational pressures that we
are now dealing with, as opposed to the construction focus that
we had previously. The reconfiguration was trying to capture the
move from the construction focus to now dealing with all the operational
issues that will come up as we get near to the Games time, and
it was making sure that we are covering those cost pressures as
they arise.
Q134 Chair: The area where
you have a liability but no budgeted contribution is the LOCOG
financing of the Games themselves. We understand that it has raised
something like three quarters of the £2 billion that will
be required. Are you still confident that it will raise the full
amount?
Hugh Robertson: Yes. It has raised
£670 million in sponsorship to date. If you are going to
do an event like this—of such national importance as a London
Olympics— naturally, the very big companies will want to
be associated with it, but even so, it is a pretty remarkable
record to have raised £670 million, given the economic backdrop
that it has faced. Given that record, there is absolutely no reason
to doubt that it will achieve the rest. LOCOG is far ahead of
where any other organising committee has ever been at this stage.
David Goldstone: It has, as you
say, raised nearly three quarters of the total revenue it needs
for the Games. The bulk of the balance left to be raised is the
ticketing revenue. I think Paul Deighton has said to you at other
times that if we knew at this point that that was the largest
remaining risk on the revenues, that would be a good position.
There is a lot of confidence around ticketing—the launch
of the tickets earlier this year was very well received and the
ticket forecasts are soundly based. Obviously there is an uncertainty
and a risk until the actual tickets are sold and the revenues
arise, but the bulk of the 30% or so of the revenues that are
not yet secure relates to the tickets.
Q135 Chair: There is also
the—
Hugh Robertson: There's the contribution
from the IOC as well.
Chair: Yes. There is that, which we assume
is guaranteed.
Hugh Robertson: It is secured,
yes. One of the great advantages of having the Olympic Games in
a city like London is that the broadcasting come, and all the
rest of it—a point lost on FIFA I might say, but there we
go.
Q136 Chair: But there are
also the potential receipts from the post-Games sale, particularly
at the Village. Are you confident that that can be maintained?
Hugh Robertson: Yes, absolutely.
Of course, they're slightly different budgets—in fact, wholly
different budgets—but I think we have all been quite pleasantly
surprised by the level of interest, which is far greater than
any of us thought it would be. As you are probably aware, as a
result of the press release that the ODA put out a week or so
ago, there are some pretty meaty names in there which are interested
in taking it on. They are working through the details at the moment,
and I hope that by the early part of next year we will be in a
much clearer position on who is prepared to offer what; but the
initial expression of interest is extraordinarily encouraging.
Q137 Chair: We explored with
Paul Deighton last week the 18-month accounting period you have
agreed to. I quite understand that the last thing that they want
to do is to have to finalise accounts two or three months before
the Games. Are you confident that there are safeguards against
problems developing—fraud, mistakes and that kind of thing—if
you are going to have that length of time without figures being
produced?
Hugh Robertson: The answer to
that is very definitely yes. I think it's fair to say that, as
the focus on the Games has moved from construction to operations,
actually the Government are now much closer to LOCOG than was
the case probably 18 months ago. That is not a political change;
it's just a feature of how the project has developed. We have
clearly worked very closely with LOCOG through the CSR and, indeed,
have been going through its budget item by item and line by line—quite
a lot of time for both of us over the past seven months—and
we are entirely confident about that.
David Goldstone: In relation to
the safeguards to which you are referring, we have agreed, as
part of agreeing to move to the 18-month period, that we will
get financial information that will be reviewed by LOCOG's auditors
at the 12-month point, when the accounts would normally be due,
so that we'd have a picture there. We are discussing what, if
any, other protections around fraud and irregularities are needed,
but there are quite comprehensive arrangements in place, so as
long as those continue to function, we don't see the need for
extra arrangements. We did go through this with the Treasury and
the NAO before we put the proposal forward for agreement.
Q138 Chair: The NAO was perfectly
happy?
David Goldstone: The NAO was comfortable—without
people from NAO being here to speak for themselves—on the
basis of an agreement that we should ensure we got financial information
at the March 12-month point as normal, which its auditors could
give us a level of assurance around and which we could bring into
DCMS's accounts, so that you would see a full picture. They wouldn't
be full, audited accounting statements, but we'd have sort of
management accounts that would have been reviewed and we'd make
sure that the normal controls against fraud had continued to operate.
We will have information and assurance at the 12-month point.
Hugh Robertson: Of course, we
have a representative on both the board and on the audit committee.
Q139 Chair: May we move on
to legacy? The Olympic Park Legacy Company (OPLC), we now understand,
is essentially going to be moved into the Mayor's domain. Can
you give us a bit more detail as to why that decision has been
taken, how it's going to work and what the implications are for
costs and legacy?
Hugh Robertson: I think it's a
wholly positive move. I remember thinking back on this. As I think
you know, I worked in the property division of Schroders before
coming into Parliament. When we were looking at financing large-scale
developments, the things that added cost were when you didn't
have total control of the assets that you were trying to develop.
I remember a number of development schemes in which parcels of
land were held by different landowners, and it became extremely
difficult to provide a proper comprehensive development. One of
the most encouraging things that has happened over the past six
months is clearing up the remaining land ownership issues, to
bring them all under the remit of the Olympic Park Legacy Company
and then, with the creation of the mayoral development corporation,
to roll control of all of those assets into one body—a body
that extends beyond the remit of OPLC. In terms of getting a comprehensive
and value-for-money settlement—in public money terms—this
is absolutely the right thing to do and, indeed, is a carbon copy
of what was done in a number of places in the '80s, when similar
large-scale development was undertaken. Look at how the docklands
development was done—all brought into a single entity, which
is what provided the value and the opportunity. In some ways,
the parallels to that are obvious.
Q140 Chair: The OPLC hasn't
been in existence for that long. It begs the question why you
didn't do that in the first place. I know that you weren't responsible,
because you weren't there, but had you been there would you have
done that?
Hugh Robertson: If you'd asked
me when the thing was set up, based on my experience at Schroders,
whether it was an absolute prerequisite to get all the assets
in the Park under one control, I would have said yes, because
that's the best way to drive the best possible solution and the
best value for public money.
Q141 Chair: Is it going to
be funded by the Mayor completely?
Hugh Robertson: OPLC is funded
by the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG).
Q142 Chair: But after, the
Mayor?
Hugh Robertson: The Mayor thereafter.
Q143 Chair: So, the Mayor
is going to take on that cost?
Hugh Robertson: There is a grant
that has just been settled, as part of the CSR, for OPLC.
David Goldstone: At the moment,
the funding is predominantly through a DCLG grant, but the Mayor
is also expected to contribute. There is an agreed sharing of
funding between the Government and the Mayor. The funding, once
it is in a mayoral development corporation, is still to be resolved,
but it will be a mayoral body, so the prime responsibility will
be with the Mayor.
Hugh Robertson: But the interim
funding that gets it to there has just been agreed in the CSR.
Q144 Chair: Is Baroness Ford
going to continue to play a part?
Hugh Robertson: She will certainly
continue to play a part in OPLC. There are some important decisions
coming up over both the Village and the main stadium over the
next six months. She has played a considerable role in getting
this organisation to where it is at the moment. I very much hope
that she will stay involved as long as the organisation is there
and, I hope, beyond that.
Q145 Chair: How long will
the organisation be there?
Hugh Robertson: That slightly
depends on when the mayoral development corporation comes into
being.
David Goldstone: The planned timetable
is for the mayoral development corporation to be legally in existence
in April or May 2012. There are obviously then issues on the transition,
because the Olympic Games will be about to happen. The handover
of management responsibility is likely to be after the Games.
Those are all details that need to be worked through as the legislation
is taken through and put into effect. There are both governance,
funding and operational responsibility issues that will get resolved
as those plans get taken forward. OPLC is carrying on as the organisation
taking forward all the responsibilities now and is, in effect,
working in anticipation of becoming the new body.
Q146 Damian Collins: On the
physical legacy of the Games, I'd like to ask some questions about
the stadium in particular. Mr Robertson, in general how happy
are you with the process of considering the use of the stadium
after the Games, and the bidding process that we are still going
through?
Hugh Robertson: I'm very happy,
and I'm encouraged that we have two very strong, albeit slightly
different, bids. I have to be a little bit careful, because we
are in the middle of a legal process at the moment, and there
are some powerful backers on both those bids, and you can open
yourself up to judicial review if you are not careful about it.
In broad terms, however, I think it is extraordinarily encouraging
that there are two very strong and slightly different bids competing
for the use of the stadium. Without that, it will be much more
difficult to drive the maximum value for the public purse out
of it.
Q147 Damian Collins: Is it
technically possible that whoever bids successfully to take over
the stadium could knock it down after the Games?
Hugh Robertson: Technically possible,
yes. When you say knock it down, it depends exactly what you mean
by that. You can take bits off it, yes, but there's an awful lot
of work that goes into the structure underneath the ground. I
cannot imagine anyone not wanting to make use of the podium level,
the foundations and all the rest of it. I think that it is extraordinarily
unlikely that anyone will wipe it off the face of the map and
take out all the work downstairs.
Q148 Damian Collins: I suppose
what I mean is that it may not be recognisable as the stadium
as we will know it during the Games.
Hugh Robertson: Yes. It is perfectly
possible to alter the shape of the stadium in some way, shape
or form.
Q149 Damian Collins: Do you
think that that raises any questions about the initial design
for the stadium? If, for example, that is the way a Premiership
football club decided to adapt the site to be suitable for Premiership
football—requiring major changes to what will be one of
the iconic symbols of the Games—it poses questions about
whether the initial design for the stadium was the right one.
Hugh Robertson: Hindsight is a
great thing in this regard. The Chairman will tell you that this
was a debate that we had in opposition, when I was working for
him five years ago on all this. To understand how we have got
to where we are now, you have to remember that at the time we
bid for the Olympics, in 2004-05, we were probably the third-favoured
option, behind Paris and Madrid. As part of our bid, it was made
clear to us that if we wanted to hoover up the considerable number
of athletics votes, one of the key commitments was to leave an
athletics legacy. Indeed, without the Olympic stadium—you
all remember the Picketts Lock disaster in the early 2000s—we
do not have somewhere where you could currently stage a world
athletics championship, which is a curious omission for a country
of our size and one that has produced so many great athletes over
the years.
As part of our bid to the IOC, and the basis
on which we won the Games, we committed ourselves to leaving that
athletics legacy, which is what we are dealing with now. Would
it have been easier to do the Manchester solution, where you take
the track out and hollow it down, as happened at the Stadium of
Light? Yes, but that was not what we promised the IOC that we
would do, and it was not the basis on which we won the Games.
David Goldstone: Could I just
add, in relation to the design, that the stadium has been designed
to be demountable, as you know, down to the athletics stadium?
There are different solutions, which the different bidders are
now coming forward on, about how that might be configured. Partly,
that denotes the flexibility that was one of the innovations of
the design. It can be demounted and reconstructed into different
forms, which, for something as large and engineered as an Olympic
stadium, is quite an achievement. On the basis that if we had
the Olympic Games we had to have an Olympic stadium, to have one
that can be adapted to different forms so that it can be used
in different ways in legacy is a positive of the design. There
may have been other ways in which that could have been achieved,
but I would see it as a positive rather than as a negative of
the way it was designed. The stadium has flexibility and can be
reconstructed in different ways.
Hugh Robertson: I think, actually,
of the two decisions, the intention to take it back down to a
25,000-seater stadium was the less praiseworthy, because if you
look at it now, and we were there last night, it is a fantastic
structure. What people do not realise about it—you may be
about to come on to this—is that when you have this football
versus track argument, it is very often made by people who think
back to 1980s designs for mixed-use stadia. If you look at the
Olympic stadium now, the sightlines in it have moved forward an
entire generation. I remember standing there about three or four
months ago, and you could see the workmen—my eyesight is
not what it was 20 years ago—having their sandwiches and
crisps across the stadium. The sightlines are fantastic, and I
think that this whole debate about taking the track out is a bit
silly, because you get a fantastic atmosphere in there even with
the track.
Q150 Damian Collins: I know
that the arguments with regard to the track have been gone over
many times before. There were concerns that without a permanent
track being built, the level of performance from the track during
the Games might not be of the standing that people would want.
I suppose it is still true to say that there might not be an athletics
legacy from the Olympic stadium.
Hugh Robertson: No—well,
there will be an athletics legacy. One of the OPLC's criteria,
which it has asked the bidding partners to agree to, is leaving
an athletics legacy. It is true to say that that does not have
to be inside the stadium. But you would have to come up with something
fairly persuasive, and that will be one of the factors against
which the OPLC will make its recommendation.
Q151Damian Collins:
Is the question whether this country has a suitable venue to stage
a world athletics championship in the future entirely dependent
on the outcome of the bidding process for the stadium?
Hugh Robertson: Absolutely correct,
which was why I pulled the bid for the 2015 world athletics championship.
Q152 Damian Collins: So, depending
on which consortium wins the bid, there may or may not be an athletics
legacy at the stadium itself.
Hugh Robertson: Potentially, yes,
but clearly that was a pretty important commitment. It is like
every decision—when we weigh this in the balance, one bid
might score very highly for financial backers and do rather less
well on the athletics legacy. You have to weigh those two and
make a decision.
I should just finish by saying that I am absolutely
determined that, having committed £500 million-worth of public
money to this, we produce a stadium that is full of people. I
don't want to come back here, as in Australia, and find tumbleweed
blowing through it in 18 months' time. To have something that
is full of people enjoying sport is absolutely key for me personally
and for ensuring that we deliver value for money out of what has
been a pretty sizeable public investment.
Q153 Damian Collins: I would
like to move on to a couple of other areas of the Olympic site.
How does the development of the new media city out of the media
centre fit with the Prime Minister's support for the development
of the Old Street roundabout area in Hackney and Shoreditch as
a media hub and the BBC's plan to encourage more media businesses
into White City?
Hugh Robertson: The answer to
the question is absolutely. The two are locked together. The Secretary
of State went out to Silicon Valley to have a look at this a month
or so ago and came back very enthused by the possibility of creating
a sort of digital and new media hub down in the east end of London.
In terms of employment opportunities and the way that area might
move forward, it's a very attractive vision; it's a great idea.
We're now in the stage of trying to bottom out
the various expressions of interest. The BBC is concentrating
on the stadia in many ways, but the IBC/MPC is an important part
of that. The OPLC is working through it at the moment, and I hope
we'll have a firmer idea of where that's going in the early part
of next year.
Q154 Damian Collins: There
have been reports—some of them produced by Government and
some by other groups—looking at the way that media businesses
cluster around hubs. The National Endowment for Science, Technology
and the Arts (NESTA) produced a report very recently on that.
Has the Department taken advice from outside groups?
Hugh Robertson: Absolutely. I
think McKinsey is giving some free advice on this. There is a
consortia of people who have been brought together to advise on
it.
Q155 Damian Collins: Finally,
with regards to the aquatic centre—one of the iconic designs
of the Village, which I'm sure we will all be proud of when the
Games are under way—what assessment have you made of the
legacy costs for that building in maintaining it and of how viable
it would be as an aquatic centre aimed at elite sportsmen and
women? It is a high-cost facility in its own right, which otherwise
would not exist in London, with quite high maintenance costs for
the design as well.
Hugh Robertson: A funny thing
that I have often noticed while I have held this brief, both in
opposition and now in government, is a sort of iconic cry that
we haven't got enough 50-metre pools. We're always compared unflatteringly
to the French, who seem to produce them in every single city.
London, slightly embarrassingly, has only one at the moment, over
in the west, so there is a very clear need to service the east
end of London with a proper Olympic pool. One of the complexities
of this whole question is that Olympic-sized competition pools
have a very different configuration and make-up from ordinary
leisure pools; I don't know if you're a swimmer and I'm telling
you something you know already. You have to hold the temperature
artificially a bit lower because of the speed at which the swimmers
go up and down the lanes. If you put them in an ordinary leisure
pool, they would sweat out, and it would all get pretty unpleasant
pretty quickly. It is a slightly different sort of thing. That
said, there is a clear and very demonstrable need to have a second
one in London, and in the east of London. The local community
is crying out for it. British Swimming is also crying out for
such a facility. So I'm entirely confident that we're doing the
right thing.
David Goldstone: I think in terms
of the economics—we touched on the stadium and the media
centre already—from the OPLC's perspective, it is looking
at the rest of the park, including the aquatics centre, the handball
arena, which will become a multi-use arena in the public domain,
and the areas that will be available as venues alongside the development
activities, and developing a business plan for operating them,
in relation to the cost of management, the revenues and the uses
they can be put to. That is the work the OPLC has been doing behind
the business plans that are coming out. It will then start to
try to procure the operators and bring in the expertise to run
the venue as a viable venue and legacy early in the new year.
Q156 Damian Collins: Is it
your assessment that the aquatics centre may continue to need
some form of public support as an elite sports venue?
David Goldstone: I think it's
quite possible. Swimming venues are expensive to run. The point
of this is to not see it in isolation, but to see it as part of
the whole Park and how that is run and managed in legacy, alongside
other aspects that will bring in visitors and revenue without
needing subsidy. Looking at the whole, the intention is to get
a viable business plan that will work for the totality, where
the aquatics will be an important attraction for bringing people
in, as a much-needed facility. It's important to remember with
the aquatics, that both the design and the need were there before
we had the Olympic Games coming to London. The need was identified
and the design was being developed before there was a Games, just
because it was needed and there was a wish to have that sort of
facility.
Q157 Damian Collins: I suppose that
an early decision was taken, probably during the bidding process,
that the aquatics centre would not just provide a physical amenity
but would be deliberately designed to be an iconic venue for the
Games.
David Goldstone: Yes.
Q158 Damian Collins: It was
always envisaged that it was the type of centre that would need
ongoing public support, even though, in the balance, there will
be a sustainable legacy for the site.
Hugh Robertson: They tend to,
is the answer to that. You'll be aware of swimming pools in your
constituency—I'm trying to think where the one in Folkestone
is. They tend to have a life and then begin to look a bit tired,
don't they?
Q159 Dr Coffey: There's a
vicious rumour circulating about the ongoing costs of certain
design aspects of the velodrome or the aquatics centre—I
can't remember which. The rumour is that the wood is so special
that it can be seasoned only by rhubarb juice. Do you want to
quash that theory, or should we all be investing in rhubarb?
Hugh Robertson: Yes, we can quash
that theory. It is not one that has permeated from Suffolk to
London.
Dr Coffey: No, I picked it up in London,
not in Suffolk.
Hugh Robertson: You've probably
got some rhubarb producers.
Q160 Dr Coffey: There's a
genuine concern, which has already been referred to, about the
pool. The mayor of Newham has said, "We're not sure this
is fit for our community. We will probably go and build another
one anyway." That seems a bit of a shame.
David Goldstone: It's a different
sort of facility to a pool where you might take young kids splashing.
It will have a dive pool and 50-metre pools for reasonably serious
specialist swimming, and it is intended that it will have a wider
catchment area than just the immediate community, although it
will hopefully be attractive to the immediate community as well.
It will partly fill a need across London for such a facility.
Q161 Chair: Can I move on
to the relationship that you have with the host boroughs, to which
we've talked at some length? You'll obviously be aware that Tower
Hamlets is very unhappy that it doesn't now appear to have any
Olympic event taking place within the borough, and Newham has
been saying that a lot of the hoped-for recruitment in jobs and
the facilities haven't really materialised, as yet. Are you confident
that there is still going to be a major socio-economic regeneration
for those boroughs?
Hugh Robertson: I am, actually.
To be completely honest about this, there is a process that you
go through in the life of an Olympic Games, from bid to delivery.
In the beginning, the IOC tells you that public support for the
thing is going to tail off pretty quickly, as everyone realises
how much it's going to cost. Then there's a brief spike during
the Games before yours, when you think it's coming, and then there's
a really severe fall-off in public support. Clearly, in the early
days of the project my predecessor spent quite a lot of time trying
to keep enthusiasm and support for the Games alive. There then
comes a moment when you have to rationalise that and say, "Actually,
this is what we can really deliver. This is what the Government
can do; this is what the Government can help you do; and this
is what you're going to have to do yourselves." I think that
it's fair to say that, with the advent of a new Government, we're
in that rationalisation phrase, and part of the legacy statement
that we tabled before Parliament yesterday was to put on the table
exactly what we thought we could deliver.
I can sort of understand why there's a little
bit of grumbling, because that's the nature of the beast, and
boroughs will campaign to get as much as they can, just as all
of us fight to get as much as we can for our own constituencies.
I think that anyone who starts to say that the promised legacy
in that part of the world has not been delivered is simply talking
rubbish. If you look at the very considerable transport improvements
in that part of the world, the new home, the creation of the largest
new urban park anywhere in Europe, the arrival of the Westfield
shopping centre over the roof of Stratford and the very considerable
number of jobs—10,000 people are employed on the Olympic
Park as we sit here—it is a very considerable success story,
and most other parts of the country would give their right arm
for such an opportunity. I understand Tower Hamlets' unhappiness
about the marathon in particular, but to broaden that out into
a more general, "This has passed us by," is just wrong.
Q162 Chair: I think that concern
was particularly expressed about the number of jobs being created.
You will be aware that there have been complaints that these aren't
actually going to local people and they may not be permanent.
Hugh Robertson: I reject that.
There are 10,000 people working on the Olympic Park at this precise
moment—in the teeth of a considerable recession. So, the
10,000 extra jobs sound like a pretty fair investment in the economy.
I think that the figures are 25% of the work force on the main
Park and 29% in the Village coming from those host boroughs. That
is a pretty considerable boost to the local economy.
David Goldstone: On the permanency
point, the nature of the project is time limited, so people are
working there, in most cases, for a fairly defined time. Equally,
quite a change of skills and roles is going on as well. The estimation
at the moment is that, although the number of 10,000 jobs has
been fairly constant for a while, over the life of the project
about 30,000 different people will be involved in the Olympic
Park, just on the construction side. Of course, there will then
be a considerable number of quite different roles, which LOCOG
will employ as well, in addition to the volunteers, in its employed
work force—in the jobs it is creating, it is trying to make
the most of its role in encouraging local opportunities. So, we
are expecting, again, some thousands of jobs to come out of the
LOCOG Games-time demand for work force as well.
Hugh Robertson: There's also the
Westfield development in Stratford—in itself, that will
bring a further 20,000 jobs. So, it's a pretty thin argument,
I think.
Chair: Just give me one minute to consult
with my colleague.
My colleague, Thérèse Coffey,
has a Parliamentary Question, which we might have to have a break
for—but we will press on and see where we get.
Q163 Damian Collins: The Department
published a document on the Olympic legacy yesterday. In the section
on the sporting legacy, particularly thinking of school sport,
on page 2, it says: "The Department for Education has…announced
that it will provide funding of £65 million for the school
years 2011/12 and 2012/13, so that secondary schools can release
a PE teacher to organise competitive sports, embed good practice
and train primary teachers." Does the inclusion of those
couple of sentences in the document follow the decision of the
Secretary of State for Education to review his spending commitments?
Hugh Robertson: That is the result
of the Secretary of State's decision. So, it should be very good
news for that nice man down in Folkestone.
Q164 Damian Collins: Absolutely.
What role did your Department play in agreeing that?
Hugh Robertson: It's a funding
decision for the DfE, and it was taken by the Secretary of State
and the Department for Education. Clearly, we were keen to make
the argument for investment in sport—as you would expect
us to make the argument for continued investment in sport. Having
said that, we recognise that this is not our departmental budget
and it's primarily a decision for the Department for Education—you
have to balance that, of course.
As I have watched this argument develop, I have
actually felt enormously sorry for the Secretary of State for
Education, because he took an absolutely correct decision, in
my view, to hand over control of school budgets to schools. In
every secondary school that I've been into in the county of Kent
in my nearly 10 years as an MP, head teachers have said, "We
want control of our own school budgets." He gave them that.
Then, as part of his deficit reduction, he had a much smaller
pot, from which he had to make the full 10% cut across the budget,
and he had the pupil premium to fund. Of all the people who had
been criticising this decision—I, too, am a great sports
fan and want as much money going to sport as possible—not
a single one of them came up with a constructive suggestion about
what you could cut. They just wanted more money. I have never
thought, given the backdrop we are facing, that that is a terribly
persuasive argument.
Q165 Damian Collins: Is it
your view that this new settlement for the School Sports Partnership
and sport in schools will be sustainable? The training support
that the schools will provide with this funding over the next
couple of years will mean that, when that funding goes, they will
be well equipped to continue the level of co-ordination required
between schools to organise competitive events.
Hugh Robertson: Yes, I do think
that, absolutely. Again, a lot of head teachers have made representations
on the subject. They have control of their own budgets now, so
they are in a position to make exactly those sorts of calls. I
hope they will make them.
Q166 Damian Collins: Do you
not feel that it might be an excuse for schools to say that they
are downgrading sport within their curriculum as a result of spending
decisions taken by the Government?
Hugh Robertson: No—absolutely
not in any way at all. They have been asking for years and years
to be freed up and given control of their own budgets—as
they always put it, free from Government and local authority interference.
As I said, in literally every school I've been into in the past
nine years, I have heard some variation on that theme. They now
have that control, and it's up to them to spend the money wisely
and for the benefit of the people at the school. For those schools
that do sport and do it well—I hope there will be an increasing
number of them, because it's wrong to pretend that everything
is perfect in school sport—they now have the capacity to
do that.
Q167 Damian Collins: A number
of leading sportsmen and women petitioned the Government over
the decision to withdraw funding from the school sports partnership,
and expressed their concern that it might affect the sporting
legacy of the Olympic Games. Was that ever a concern that you
shared?
Hugh Robertson: No. One of the
factors that you see time and time again is that, if you are running
a political campaign, you need a hook to put it on. One of the
most attractive hooks lying around government at the moment is
London 2012, so all sorts of people try to get an Olympic element
into whatever they are doing. I am absolutely confident, on the
sporting legacy, that we can deliver from London 2012. I am delighted
that we have come to a sensible accommodation over school sport.
It is the right outcome.
With my Sports Minister's hat on, I get a little
bit annoyed with elite athletes who take this view, because in
this country we fund elite athletes—and we preserved their
funding in the Comprehensive Spending Review—in a way that
countries in any other part of the world do not. Many of those
athletes, who are at the forefront of those demonstrations, have
benefited hugely from lottery and Exchequer funding over their
careers. Not a single one of them seemed to come up with a sensible
idea. They were not saying, "We would like you to cut this
in order to fund that", they were just saying, "Give
us the money."
The statistic you need to remember in all of
this, is that we pay out, in debt interest payments, every day,
more than the entire annual Exchequer budget for Sport England.
Chair: I'm going to cease there, because
Dr Coffey has got to go. If the Minister is content, may we adjourn
for, say, 15 minutes and then perhaps finish off?
Anyone who wishes to come back and continue
to listen when we reconvene is free to do so, but I would find
it useful if the Committee could have a quick private session
with the Minister. It would be quite useful to have a quick word
about our next inquiry.
The Committee suspended.
On resuming—
Chair: We will continue, just to finish
off.
Q168 Dr Coffey: I was interested
in the merger of UK Sport and Sport England, especially in the
concept that the merger involves not just one devolved body; Sport
England has responsibilities and there will still be sports bodies
elsewhere in the UK, in Northern Ireland, Wales and Scotland.
Why do you think that that is a more effective structure to deliver?
Hugh Robertson: The honest answer
is that I am not sure I do, but it is what we are served up with
as a result of the devolution settlement. That is the short answer
to that question. I think that the bringing together of UK Sport
and Sport England, to start with, and hopefully other sports bodies
in the years to come is the right thing to do for three reasons.
The first reason is that it has been a recurrent
nightmare for successive Governments that the sports landscape
has little bodies littered all over it, as far as the eye can
see. Back in 1997, I think that it was Tessa Jowell, or somebody
else, who described it as a "nightmare" and it has long
been a nightmare. Somebody told me that there were 19 bodies involved
in the regulation of golf—I do not know if that is entirely
true. However, regarding the bodies that the Government are responsible
for, I think that we ought to clarify the situation. So what I
want to do is to ensure that, after 2012, we have a unified, modern
and effective delivery structure for British sport, so that people
come here and think, "That's how to do it".
Secondly, I want that structure to leverage
the very considerable commercial opportunities brought into sport
through London 2012. Nearly £700 million of commercial sponsorship
has come in to support the Olympics process, and I do not want
that money simply moving on to the next caravan that is passing
through. I want to capture it for sport.
Thirdly and most important, it is quite wrong
in an era when public finances are as tight as they are that there
should be two separate Government bodies—Sport England and
UK Sport—both residing in expensive central London offices,
chewing up money that could otherwise be delivered to the front
line. We told them that, by the end of the Comprehensive Spending
Review period, they had to cut their administrative costs by 50%,
and they cannot do that until we can move them out of central
London offices.
We are going through that process at the moment,
but it strikes me that the Government have invested a very considerable
amount of money in a fantastic set of new sports facilities in
the east end of London, which will be christened the Queen Elizabeth
Olympic Park. It will be a really wonderful sports heart and a
centre for British sport for many years to come, and it would
make a great deal of sense to locate there, where the rents are
£20 a square foot, which is not what they are in central
London, and to deliver a much more efficient, unified, coherent
body for British sport.
I will give you one example of where this is
going wrong at the moment. I have started meeting the two chief
executives once a month together. So they come into my office
and we go through the issues for Sport England and those for UK
Sport. As part of that process, we discovered that UK Sport has
a very successful programme that attracts major sports events
to this country; it is called the major events budget. When we
secure one of those events, UK Sport put a little bit of funding
in to back it, but there is no compensating adjustment in the
whole sport plan on the other side of the piece. So you could
win the right to host the world hockey championships—we
didn't, actually, but we could do that—and then there is
nothing in hockey's whole sport plan that caters for the numbers
of people who you hope, seeing that the world championships are
here, will think, "Actually, I'd quite like to try my hand
at that". Joining all that sort of thing up is an absolutely
key objective in all of this process.
You asked about the home nations bit, to touch
on that issue. There are sensitivities north of the border, over
the marshes and across the Irish sea about all of this. It wasn't
my initial preferred option, but I suspect that, in order to get
this to work, I will probably have to compromise. The elite high
performance division, broadly replicating the functions of UK
Sport, will probably have to have its own board, to lock in the
Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish angles, and likewise Sport
England to lock out the takeover. That is a compromise that we
will have to make as a result of the devolution settlement.
Q169 Dr Coffey: Do you think
that if this merger is seen to be a success you can persuade the
Ministers of the other home nations to join in the actual execution
of sport? Although sport is a devolved matter, that is for policy.
Hugh Robertson: I would love to
think so, but realistically, I doubt it. It's an honest answer.
Of course it would make a lot of sense, but sport is so much a
matter of national pride and is so important to any devolved Government—and
I sort of understand that.
It was clear when I was out in Delhi during
the party conference that the Scots are marketing Glasgow '14
as Scotland's Olympics. Against that backdrop, it is very unlikely,
if not impossible, that it would ever give up control of Sport
Scotland.
Q170 Chair: When you were
talking about the hockey and what would have happened had we been
successful, you touched on the need to have people ready to welcome
in all those people who are inspired to take up the sport. In
order to deliver a real sporting legacy from the Games, are you
confident that the athletics, swimming and cycling clubs across
the country will have people ready to deal with queues of young
people who will be inspired to take up those sports?
Hugh Robertson: Yes, I think,
is the answer to that. I shall explain why I am treading a little
bit carefully. Sport England was an organisation that, in opposition,
we were quite tough on. It took the decision two years ago to
change its funding structure so that it attempted to deliver increases
in mass participation through the sport national governing bodies—the
so-called whole sport plans. They have only been in operation
for 18 months. I am determined not to fall into the trap that
many of my predecessors have fallen into, which is to set a new
initiative in train and then start messing it around 18 months
into its operation. They have to be allowed to see this process
through for a logical four-year funding cycle.
The sport governing bodies made very strong
representations that that was how they wanted to deliver increases
in mass participation. I'm not sure that they entirely realised
at the time quite how much responsibility and onus that would
put on them. They are going to be judged against very clear and
very strict performance parameters before we grant the next round
of whole sport plan funding. If, in two years' time when the programme
comes to an end, they have failed to deliver, there will be some
searching questions for people who chair the FA, the ECB, the
RFU, the RFL, the Lawn Tennis Association, and the rest of them.
As a means of delivering increases in participation, however,
I believe that allowing sport governing bodies to do it, not Government,
is indeed the correct way to proceed.
Chair: We haven't got much more ground
to cover. Thérèse, do you want to come back to security?
Q171 Dr Coffey: I do. We have
already touched on the budget and got the numbers sorted. Are
you confident that the security planning is on track?
Hugh Robertson: Yes, I am. When
I was the Opposition spokesman, I was not confident of that. I
do not say that in a particularly party political way. I remember
chairing a security seminar at the Royal United Services Institute
a couple of years ago and walking out of it thinking, "Heavens,
this just doesn't seem to be where it ought to be." Since
that period, the Metropolitan police have caught up with their
planning.
There is no doubt about it: the advent of Pauline
Neville-Jones has been a thoroughly good thing for this process.
She reviewed it all when she took over and we are now absolutely
confident, sitting here, that security planning is where it ought
to be. That said—this touches on the answer I gave earlier—only
a fool would pretend that the fact that we are confident now means
that we can be confident that we will be safe in 2012, because
it is a fast-moving feast. Even in the seven months that the coalition
Government have been in power, we have seen a very considerable
increase in the dissident Republican threat across the water.
We're beginning to understand much better how the al-Qaeda franchises
work— particularly al-Qaeda on the Arabian Peninsula—and
how those threats are likely to be delivered. That threat will
continue to evolve and move as we get closer to London 2012.
I think that sometimes in this country, we are
in danger of underplaying the expertise we have in security. I
was conscious of it when I was serving in the Army and I am conscious
of it now as a Minister dealing with the security forces. Our
special forces and our security forces in this country are very
good, as are the police, when it comes to this sort of thing.
So I can only say that I am as confident as one could be at this
stage that we are where we ought to be, against the challenging
backdrop.
Q172 Dr Coffey: Outside security,
what in your view are the biggest risks to the Olympic and Paralympic
programmes? How are you ensuring effective co-ordination to mitigate
those risks? I know you have made some allocation of funds.
Hugh Robertson: I'll try not to
lose sleep about it, but if you ask me today what my three biggest
concerns are, as the Minister likely—touch wood—to
be responsible for this in 18 months time, they are: security;
transport; and, I would then add, which might surprise you, some
sort of athletic implosion. It was very clear from going out to
Vancouver that the moment that the home nation, Canada, got behind
the Vancouver Olympics was the moment that they won a gold medal.
We go through the budgets, the planning, the processes and all
the other things that you need to deliver an Olympics, but there
is a danger of forgetting that for the vast majority of people
sitting outside this room, they will remember the 2012 Olympics
from some iconic sporting moment. There is a young athlete somewhere
out there who will provide the Seb Coe in Los Angeles moment,
or the Kelly Holmes moment, or whatever the iconic moment that
sums up those Games is. The good news on that front is that the
Olympic movement in this country got a huge boost through Beijing.
If you look at the subsequent results, tracking them to the World
Championships, it is shaping up very well. Colin Moynihan has
a very good figure—
Chair: He gave it to us last week.
Hugh Robertson: So as you now
know, 0.545 seconds is the margin of error that separated gold
medals from silver medals in Athens. You are down to fractions
of a second in this game.
Q173 Damian Collins: Following
on the theme of security, I have a few Kent-related questions,
if I may. What level of co-ordination has there been between the
Kent police and the French authorities in particular, given that
I read that they estimate that about a quarter of people coming
from mainland Europe to London for the Games will come through
the tunnel or by sea to Dover? There are considerable joint efforts
in managing the security implications of that.
Hugh Robertson: If you'd asked
me just before you got elected, I would have said, "Very
considerable." When I was in opposition, I used to take counsel
from the former chief constable of Kent fairly regularly. Because
I was doing this and you had your meeting with him a couple of
weeks ago, I have not had the Olympics-specific conversation with
him, but there is nothing that I have seen to suggest that the
co-ordination on this is not absolutely where it ought to be.
Q174 Damian Collins: Presumably
the Home Office takes the lead on this within Government. Does
it provide briefings to you?
Hugh Robertson: Yes. When we took
over, we went to have specific Olympic-related briefings from
the security services, which for obvious reasons I will not go
into today. Pauline Neville-Jones sits on the Cabinet Committee,
so we have her there; that meets every month to go through a series
of things. She has done her review and reported on it to the Committee.
The Home Office is in the lead. I am as confident as you possibly
can be that that is absolutely where it ought to be. The Secretary
of State and I get regular threat assessment briefings from the
security services.
Damian Collins: Do you think there is
a case that, although Kent police are not a host force, because
of the geographic location, they should not be required to donate
support during the Games to other host forces, because of the
large volume of work they will have to contend with within their
own area?
Hugh Robertson: I know exactly
what you are referring to, because it was a concern of the previous
chief constable that there would clearly be a huge demand for
firearms-trained officers, in and around London, when you had
200 Heads of State potentially in London for the Olympics, and
that would inevitably draw on bordering forces. We are getting
into that dangerous operational territory now. All I can tell
you is that I am aware of the issue, but it is not one that has
been flagged as a major security concern. It's an operational
issue that can be managed, not one that it is a capability gap
as we look at it.
Q175 Damian Collins: The other
thing that I wanted to ask about is transport. In previous sessions,
particularly with the ODA, we have discussed the management of
transport infrastructure. Obviously there are major issues for
within London itself, but particularly for the major commuter
routes to the east of the City and particularly from Kent. What
sort of briefings have you had with regard to the management of
the rail network, the use of Javelin trains to ferry people between
St Pancras station and the Olympic site, and the inevitable downgrading
of services from Kent into London on those routes?
Hugh Robertson: It is a good question,
particularly given the extent to which the Javelin trains are
going to be needed to transport people from St Pancras to Stratford
and then on to Ebbsfleet and back. The current plans—nothing
is finalised—is that the high-speed service from Folkestone,
for example, through Ashford and up will operate entirely as normal
during the rush hours at either ends of the day; then they will
continue to run one or possibly two—probably more likely
one—train an hour, one to Ashford and one down to Faversham,
which pleases me enormously, obviously. The final details of that
are being worked on.
That said, I think it would be wrong of me to
sit here and try and argue that there's not going to be an effect
on anybody commuting using that line during Games time. That is
one of the downsides of hosting the world's greatest sporting
event. It would be sensible for people to plan accordingly on
the basis that there is going to be a rather different sort of
transport structure in operation, very particularly for the two
weeks of the Olympics. Frankly, if you're entirely dependent on
it in a business-critical way, it's probably quite a good time
to have your summer holiday.
Q176 Damian Collins: I think
it's fair to assume that it won't be business as usual.
Hugh Robertson: "Business
as unusual" was the strapline that Vancouver used, and that's
a very sensible one.
Q177 Damian Collins: Yes.
The railways are used by a lot of visitors from the continent
to get from east Kent into Stratford. However the service is configured,
during the day, will it be possible for people to use that rail
route to get straight to the Olympic park from the east and not
have to go into central London and back out again?
Hugh Robertson: That is currently
the plan. The final details will be released early next year.
Q178 Damian Collins: I know
there is an information campaign planned for the London area.
Will that be extended to other commuter routes outside the capital
as well?
Hugh Robertson: Yes. It's integrated—it's
one of the things we've been working on. I think everybody knows
that transport is a key issue. It is for any Games and has been
ever since the Atlanta gridlock in 1996. When I was over in Sydney
a couple of years ago, the people who ran it there said, "You
only have to get three things right with an Olympics—transport,
transport and transport." If the whole system goes down on
day one, we'll be in all sorts of trouble. We don't think that's
going to happen and we're taking every conceivable step we possibly
can to make sure it doesn't.
Damian Collins: That concludes my Kent
questions.
Q179 Dr Coffey: I'll follow
up with Essex and Suffolk questions. The A12 and A13 are key routes.
I'm just thinking, you don't want London to stop working—not
everybody is going to go to the Olympics. Is there a view that
perhaps we could have basically no tolls at the Dartford crossing
during the Olympics? At the moment, a lot of people go in through
the Blackwall tunnel to avoid the tolls. That will be a nightmare.
If we opened up the M25 and that A-road, it would be beneficial,
I'm sure.
Hugh Robertson: It is not a discussion
we've had yet. Clearly, there would be a spending commitment inherent
in that.
Q180 Dr Coffey: You have a
bit of contingency there somewhere.
Hugh Robertson: We have got a
bit of contingency, but not necessarily for that. It's a plan
that's evolving and moving. That's something that we could very
sensibly look at, but you do have to remember there is a price
tag attached to that.
Q181 Dr Coffey: You mentioned
earlier that transport was the second reason that kept you awake
at night.
Hugh Robertson: Second concern.
Dr Coffey: Second concern. Can you say
a bit more about why, particularly? I mean, you've given a full
answer to Mr Collins.
Hugh Robertson: Yes. David might
want to come in and say a bit on this, not least because I've
been batting away happily for the past 10 minutes. I don't say
that it's a major concern because there's some awful gremlin in
the cupboard that I'm not going to tell you about. It's simply
because the transport system in this country operates at pretty
close to capacity, as any of us who have seats near London know
all too well from our mailbags, on a pretty regular basis. When
you add to that the extra load that will be required during the
Olympics, that is bound to be a factor that would give anybody
organising it cause for concern.
David Goldstone: It is then trying
to balance both: making sure the athletes and officials can get
to the events, so the Games can happen effectively and smoothly
and not be disrupted, because none of the sport and none of the
show can happen without them, while minimising the disruption
on London operating. Obviously, the other venues and the areas
that feed London—commuter London—need to continue
operating in a business-as-usual way. The Olympics will not be
the only thing happening at that time, and business has to go
on as usual. The plans are all about trying to balance making
sure that everyone who needs to get to Olympic events as athletes,
officials or spectators can do so, and accepting that for a short
period there is some necessary disruption—you cannot have
this sort of show in a major city that already has a system full
to capacity, without a level of disruption—but that's minimised
so that business as usual is not disrupted. That is where everyone
is trying to pitch the plans.
The reason it is high on the challenges for
everybody involved is that there is a level of uncertainty about
it. How many visitors will come to London? How many will come
through the tunnel? How many will travel around the country? That
is uncertain. We can do a certain amount of analysis and model
predictions, but they are only assumptions and modelling. There
is some inherent uncertainty. It is sensible, as the Minister
said, to plan for a level of disruption and try to work round
it at Games time. That is what a lot of the messaging will be
about.
Hugh Robertson: One of the positive
developments of recent months has been that we are going to bring
together a transport co-ordination centre, so you don't have all
the normal little pots of this happening in all sorts of different
places, specifically to deal with the transport challenges during
Games time. That will be operationally effective for the whole
of the UK.
Q182 Chair: I have just a
couple of questions on transport. The infrastructure around the
Olympic site and within the host boroughs is obviously important.
Are you confident it is going to be delivered, despite the local
government settlement and the other aspects of economic life?
Hugh Robertson: Yes,
because the money for it lies within the public sector funding
package. We have delivered close to £500 million for transport
in and around Stratford.
David Goldstone: Yes, much of
the infrastructure is already complete. The improvements to the
overground, the North London line enhancements, the DLR—a
lot of it has been done. Stratford station improvements are being
made. All those are on track to be completed before the Games.
Q183 Chair: On the Olympic
Route Network, are you happy with the idea that poor Londoners
are going to be sitting in traffic jams watching these limousines
speed past them?
Hugh Robertson: I
was told when we discussed this a few months ago that I was absolutely
not to describe it as a necessary evil, so I won't, but there
is an element in all of this, I think, of everybody being scarred
and seared by the Atlanta experience, when the whole city descended
into gridlock. You couldn't move the athletes around, so they
weren't there for the events; you couldn't move the officials
around; and spectators spent hours sitting in gridlocks around
Atlanta. The important thing to remember about the ORN is that
it is not for transporting IOC members around London. The majority
of people who use this will be involved in the running of the
Games and making them happen operationally.
Having been slightly rude about it at the beginning,
I think it would be foolish not to have such a structure. It is
on a tiny proportion of London's roads and it will guarantee that
we can move people around efficiently between the various venues
and make the thing happen. Against that backdrop, this is a worthwhile
sacrifice to make, to ensure that London's Games have a proper
transport policy and can move around as we would want them to.
Q184 Chair: Will any other
groups be allowed to use them?
Hugh Robertson: Yes, the Olympic
and Paralympic family, the press and the broadcast media, and
the various technical officials.
Q185 Chair: There was a suggestion
that blue badge holders with Games tickets and might use them.
David Goldstone: I think that
was being looked at. I'm not sure.
Q186 Chair: It is still being
looked at?
Hugh Robertson:
It is still being looked at.
David Goldstone: We can confirm
for you. It may have been resolved one way or the other. I'm not
sure of the answer.
Q187 Chair: I have one final
question, which is the equivalent of Dr Coffey's rhubarb question.
Some interesting stories have appeared in the press. A story appeared
a few weeks ago that the first language of the Olympic Games in
London was to be French. Would you like to comment on that?
Hugh Robertson: Probably "non."
[Laughter.] That's one of those sort of stories. It is
true that the IOC as a body communicates in both languages for
historical reasons, but I think that anyone who suggests that
the first language of a London Olympics is going to be French
is probably wrong.
Q188 Chair: So reports that
signage is going to have to have French first are all—?
Hugh Robertson: It's scaremongering,
largely. Treat it with a stick of rhubarb.
Chair: In that case, that is all we have
for you. Thank you very much.
Hugh Robertson: It's been a pleasure.
Thanks.
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