Olympic and Paralympic Legacy Committee

Lord Best Excerpts

Wednesday 19th March 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Best (CB)]

My Lords, I, too, had the privilege of serving on the Select Committee. I pay tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Harris of Haringey, whose hard work in keeping us all up to speed was an invaluable component in the success of this venture, as was the extremely impressive input of our officer team and the diligence of my committee colleagues.

If I have a criticism of this experiment in the use of the Select Committee approach for a short, sharp, focused exercise, it is a positive one: a report with this much good material in it deserves more widespread publicity and dissemination. A few newspaper articles are not enough to spread the word and while this debate tonight is more than helpful, a more extensive follow-through over a sustained period would make the whole exercise better value for money.

I turn to the content of the Select Committee’s excellent report. My special interest is in the legacy promised by the Games for the regeneration of east London and beyond. Just how successful has this huge investment been and are there lessons, positive or negative, that we should take for regeneration projects both here and elsewhere in the future? A number of our witnesses explained how installing the transport and developing the sites of the Olympics and Paralympics meant compressing decades of much needed investment into a few years. The incredible facilities, the transportation systems and extensive infrastructure, and the housing—the Olympic Park alone will eventually house more than 10,000 new households—have all magically accelerated the regeneration of east London. Certainly there has been a speeding up of the hoped-for convergence between the position of the East End boroughs and the rest of London as measured by a number of key indicators.

So is this a story of unmitigated regeneration success? It is important to see what has worked and why, because of the implications for the regeneration of other post-industrial areas of the UK and, indeed, for other large-scale housebuilding projects, including the development of whole new settlements like the “garden city” of Ebbsfleet, announced earlier this week. What this whole exercise has demonstrated is that a particular set of organisational structures, a particular governance framework and a particular modus operandi can be hugely successful. The key components are central government support for a devolved local agency that crosses local authority boundaries with a powerful co-ordinating vision and a clear master plan, with powers—compulsory powers, if necessary—to acquire, assemble and control land use. Like the London Docklands Development Corporation which gave us the phenomenon of Canary Wharf, like the new town development corporations, and like so many international examples of large-scale regeneration from Amsterdam to Singapore, these are the characteristics for successful outcomes. What is then achieved is what was positively planned, in this case including high-quality buildings delivered on time and within budget, not the least of which is well designed, sustainable, affordable and accessible housing.

These are the things we hope for in other places but so seldom achieve. Indeed, the usual approach to development in the UK is almost the exact opposite. By and large we sit and wait for speculative developers to come forward for planning permission with projects that we hope will fulfil all the economic and social objectives an area needs, and we are invariably disappointed. The model of the Olympic Delivery Authority and now the new mayoral London Legacy Development Corporation, show how we can do so much better. These lessons can be transferred not just to the new town of Ebbsfleet, but to major regeneration projects far from the south-east of England, and indeed to the vital task of doubling the nation’s supply of new homes.

I come now to a less positive lesson from the regeneration legacy of 2012. Despite all the brilliant outcomes from the Games, I feel that there is an Achilles heel in this success story. It is that the economic development that produced thousands of new jobs largely bypassed Londoners born and brought up in the East End. As the noble Lord, Lord Harris, said, the Select Committee met with local community groups and heard the sense of grievance that there had been so few opportunities for them. This is confirmed by statistics suggesting that despite there being 104,000 unemployed people in the Olympics boroughs, convergence with the rest of London on the employment criteria has lagged behind, even though more than 10,000 new jobs were created by the Games. Counting as a “local”—someone who has lived nearby for the last 18 months—misses the point. Waves of workers from eastern European countries moved here over the several years of the Olympics development, and they did a great job. I accept the point made by a manager on one of the projects we visited. He agreed that it was a pity that no one on the site was truly a local, but asked, “What did you want—the Olympic village built on time and on budget or a construction training scheme for local residents?” He had a point.

In a world of globalised labour markets and with a major problem in this country of poorly targeted skills building, we cannot blame the leadership of the Olympic and Paralympic Games for failing to engage enough home-grown talent. Some useful efforts were made to persuade contractors to take on apprentices and the results were better than for most construction sites, but largely the opportunity was missed. However, the massive regeneration effort kick-started by the Games will run and run. I note in today’s Budget, for example, that extensive housing and development is to be supported in Barking and that some 6,000 new jobs are likely to result. It is not too late to change our ways and use investment in regeneration to skill up many young people—there are still nearly 1 million under 25 year-olds who are not in employment, education or training—so that we can gain not just buildings but jobs for local labour. It is wasteful to pull in the next cohort of eastern European building workers while the unemployed of east London remain unskilled and dejected.

I commend the report released two weeks ago following an inquiry by a cross-party group of parliamentarians jointly chaired by the right honourable Nick Raynsford and myself called No More Lost Generations: Creating Construction Jobs for Young People. The report, which was backed by the Construction Industry Training Board and the Chartered Institute of Building, calls for work in schools and for careers advice about the opportunities in an industry that reckons it will need over 500,000 more workers over the next four years to replace those retiring and to cope with the current expansion of building activity. Yet, as the report notes, only 7,200 apprenticeships were completed in the construction industry last year. I was encouraged by the Government’s and the mayor’s response to our firm recommendations that this issue should henceforth be given real priority in order to take forward the legacy of the Games, and I hope that the LLDC will see this through.

In conclusion, the regeneration legacy of the 2012 Games is truly wonderful and demonstrates what a proactive, empowered and devolved development structure can deliver. But as we continue to regenerate east London, and indeed take the legacy lessons elsewhere, I hope that we can use the resulting investment to achieve a double benefit, not just the infrastructure and new homes we need, but the apprenticeships, the training and the jobs that the construction industry can so importantly provide for our own next generation of workers.