Olympic and Paralympic Games 2012
Debate between Lord Addington and Lord Grade of Yarmouth
Lord Addington
My Lords, I thought I would hear nothing new about the Olympics during this debate. The noble Lord, Lord Haskel, has surprised me with the idea of flame-grilled breakfasts not complying with the rules. However, I remember when we first discussed the use of the Olympic symbol in this House—it was a good few years ago and I think the noble Lord was part of the Government of the time. Protection of the Olympic symbol is very entrenched in the Olympic movement. I will say no more because the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, is in the Chamber. We have possibly the greatest expert on this subject on the government Back Benches—or at least a far greater expert than me. Defending the Olympic symbol and gaining the best revenue from it is an interesting subject and there has been a great deal of movement on it.
When we look back at preparations for the Olympics we have to look back at the process we have gone through. Nobody expected us to get the Games or at least nobody admitted that they expected us to get them. When we did we were surprised. I thought we had done something very good in preparing the bid as it made us address planning and structural changes and to look seriously at them. It came on the back of a successful Commonwealth Games and unsuccessful bids. It was the first soft legacy from the unsuccessful bids. The real question is how we carry on the things we gained from this, especially the soft legacy and the planning.
The noble Baroness, Lady Ford, will undoubtedly be able to tell us more about the bricks-and-mortar approach. However, the thing of great interest we can take away from the Games and which will give a long-lasting legacy is the cultural change about how we use big events and learn from them for the smaller events that follow, which are still of world significance. For instance, the Cultural Olympiad, the Olympic festival, will provide months of entertainment and value—how do we learn to piggyback events successfully to get the best out of them? How do we learn to use advertising over and over again to reinforce a message? We must take this into account.
We have been greatly successful in making sure that everybody has bought into the idea that this is an important event—even if you hate it. Even if you cannot stand the idea of the Olympics it will change your life in certain ways. Everybody expects to gain some positives—that is the real thing that has come out of it. As for the process of the bid itself, apparently the noble Lord, Lord Coe, congratulated me on coming out with the most unusual compliment he had ever heard when I said, “Thank you for making the Olympic project dull”. Nothing has gone very badly wrong. The noble Baroness, Lady Ford, has an expression on her face, in which case problems have been kept quiet. We gone through the process of making sure the Games have been delivered on time and on budget. Whatever bumps and bangs there have been, that is how you will ultimately be judged. If we have done that, what else can we do?
We have annoyed a lot of journalists who had doom and gloom stories on budgets ready to be printed or sent to various people, but what else are we going to get out of this in the long term? One of the real benefits we have already taken, and it is very appropriate we raise it today because we are only 100 days away from the start of the Paralympic Games, is that the Paralympics have come to be seen as a partner on even terms, or at least close to it. That is something I did not expect to see in my lifetime. The “Does he take sugar?” attitude towards the Paralympics was certainly there at first. The attitude of, “Isn’t it jolly good we are doing something we are quite good at?” and “You mean people in wheelchairs can do that?”. People now appreciate that these are athletes trained to the peak of their capacity striving on even terms with people from all around the world to achieve something extraordinary. That is taken as read in other forms of sporting activity at the elite level. It has transformed our perception and process. If we can take that and go on, we will have done something very good.
On the subject of sponsors, I spoke to people from Sainsbury’s the other day at a reception and asked them what they get out of this—not what they give. After a little bit of nagging, I got a very honest answer: “Yes, it helps in marketing. Yes, it helps to make people in our stores feel better about themselves, which makes them better employees. Ultimately it is about something that is bigger than us, that makes us part of the community—that is what we get out of it. And it improves sales”. I may get told off by one or two people but I think that is worth a few tickets to the event, so I say thank you to the sponsors and everybody who has been involved throughout the process. They have done something which has benefited us.
Probably the only real grumble about the Olympic process has been about tickets. If you are struggling to make a story out of this, it shows how well things have gone. There was a problem with the ticket allocation because it was not designed for a total sell-out within seconds of it opening: too high a demand crashing systems; the fact that people like myself who thought we had registered in time and would get the tickets we wanted have not got them—I am available for any returns. Now the Olympics organisers are saying if you have not got them or you have only a few in the sports that probably were not your first choice, you are not eligible for the next round. They are spreading it out. There is something good coming from this. Are we going to learn how to manage demand better in future? Maybe there will be never be another demand like the Olympics but learning to manage expectation of demand is something else that has come from this.
The Olympics are now a real thing. The torch relay has started. The planning has stopped; we are now in the delivery phase. The important thing about the Olympics now is that we relax and enjoy it but also remember that we are going to take on these lessons that we have learnt and prove that, over two successive Governments of different political persuasions, as a nation we can carry something through. That is probably the biggest legacy going—that we have that capacity as a nation.
Lord Grade of Yarmouth
I declare an interest: I was in Singapore as part of the bid team. One of the most important lessons that I learnt from that was in conversation with a senior Minister who was part of the bid team. I asked him how he had managed to persuade the Treasury to give its consent to the bid and he said, “We managed to persuade Gordon that we could not possibly win”.
Lord Addington
My Lords, the management of politicians, particularly those in the Treasury, is an art form that everybody else in government tries to embrace. I think that emphasises my point rather than takes away from it.
I look forward to seeing how we learn and carry on with this. Are we going to manage to keep the initiative going? Are we going to keep the interest in sport and sporting activity going? Can the Government give us examples of how they plan to take this on board? How can people who are not in government at the moment guarantee to support this progress? How can we guarantee that we all talk to each other about what we do next? We came together around a good project; we did not think we would but we were going to have a go at it. Can we guarantee to do something else with it? That is the next big challenge.