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Olympic Games 2012: Legacy Trust

Lord Davies of Oldham: My right honourable friend the Minister for the Olympics (Tessa Jowell) has made the following Written Ministerial Statement.

The Legacy Trust will be formally launched today.

The Legacy Trust has been established to help to ensure a celebration of the London 2012 Olympic Games and Paralympic Games across the United Kingdom and to help to create a lasting legacy.

The trust will use £40 million funding endowed by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (£6 million), Arts Council England (£5 million), the Big Lottery Fund (£5 million), and the Millennium Commission (£24 million, since been transferred to the Big Lottery Fund) to deliver a programme of cultural and sporting activities at local, regional and national level. The trust will form partnerships with organisations that will deliver the supported programmes.

Following an open competition, the Legacy Trust proposal submitted by a consortium of five organisations was selected as the preferred candidate. The consortium created an independent charitable trust (known as Legacy Trust UK) and a corporate trustee (known as Legacy Trust UK Limited). The corporate trustee is a company limited by guarantee. It worked up a full business case, which the funding bodies were content with. The funding has recently been transferred. It will start operating immediately and distributing the bulk of the funds from 2008 onwards.

The trust plans to support a small number of national programmes, including the UK School Games, the Big Arts Week (working title) and the World Festival of Youth Culture (working title). The remainder of the endowment will be distributed throughout the three nations (Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland) and the nine English regions. In doing so, it will work closely with the London Organising Committee for the Olympic Games and Paralympic Games (LOCOG).

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Regional Development Agencies: South West

The Minister of State, Foreign and Commonwealth Office & Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (Lord Jones of Birmingham): My right honourable friend the Minister of State for Competitiveness (Stephen Timms) has made the following Written Ministerial Statement.

I have decided to appoint the new board members listed below:

Ellen Winser; and

Brian Robinson.

The new appointments will be for a period of three years.

I have also decided to reappoint Nick Buckland for a further period of three years.

The appointments will begin on 14 December 2007 and will expire on 13 December 2010.

I have placed further details of the new appointments in the Libraries of both Houses. They were all made in accordance with the code of practice of the Commissioner for Public Appointments.

Biographies of those appointed

Ellen Winser—After 25 years in the City, where she was the first woman to be taken into partnership by a London firm of stockbrokers (James Capel and Co) and one of the first women members of the Stock Exchange, Ellen went off long-distance sailing with her husband in 1990. In the next five years, they visited 40 countries and sailed 50,000 miles. On return, Ellen became involved with a variety of organisations in Cornwall and was chairman of Liontrust Asset Management plc from 1996 to 2004. She is now chairman of the governors of Truro College and is chairman of the trustees of the National Maritime Museum Cornwall, a governor of the University of Plymouth and a director of Pendennis Shipyard Ltd. She was chairman of Sutton Harbour Holdings plc from 1997 until earlier this year and was a director/trustee of Cornwall Care Ltd for eight years. She became a Deputy Lieutenant for Cornwall in 2003.

Brian Robinson—He has a track record developed in the financial services sector initially as an underwriter, after which he switched to marketing, where he played a key role in the merger of Eagle Star Insurance and Zurich Financial Services. More recently he has turned his efforts to the SME sector, starting a marketing and risk consultancy in 2002 and a credit management software company in 2004. He was elected to the Forest of Dean District Council in May 2007 and was appointed chairman of the Corporate Scrutiny and Review Committee; in December, he joins the cabinet with a portfolio of efficiency and finance. He is a fellow of the Chartered Insurance Institute and the Chartered Institute of Marketing.

Nick Buckland—He has spent 20 years working as a senior manager in the UK IT industry, mainly for US companies. In 1996 he took a career change,

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taking an interest in a number of activities. He holds a number of non-executive directorships in a variety of companies, including a veterinary clinical pathology laboratory, an integrated marketing company, an IT integrator and a rural tourism company. He is chairman of Tamar Science Park and is managing partner of an IT headhunting organisation and sponsorship management consultancy. He represents the RDA on the Devon and Cornwall Learning and Skills Council and is a member of the BERR Technology Strategy Board. He is an observer on the regional Science and Industry Council. He also sits on the boards of Finance Cornwall, Finance South West and Cornwall Enterprise, and he is a governor of Plymouth University. He has a BSc in mathematics and is a fellow of the British

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Computer Society, the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications and the RSA. He is also a member of the Chartered Management Institute, the Institute of Directors and the Royal Institution. He is a chartered engineer, chartered information systems practitioner and a European engineer.

UK Convergence Programme

Lord Davies of Oldham: My honourable friend the Economic Secretary to the Treasury (Kitty Ussher) has made the following Written Ministerial Statement.

Copies of the 2007 UK convergence programme have been deposited in the Libraries of both Houses.

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