Olympic Games and Paralympic Games 2012

Lord Patten Excerpts

Monday 14th June 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Patten]

My Lords, let me pick up the baton of the Olympic and Paralympic debate before my noble friend’s welcome Statement. I remind the House that a good maxim in the planning of great public projects in London is: “Never forget the Dome”. Another maxim is: “Always stick closely to the core reasons why any public project in London is being brought into existence”. There is much talk in the media and by the commentariat about everything connected to the 2012 Olympics and Paralympics, ranging from urban renewal and legacy, via green initiatives, to the better understanding of foreign languages, but it can be much too easy to lose focus on the core considerations. The last Government disastrously and hilariously lost control of the Dome project because they had wandered off from the core considerations that the Dome was all about.

I believe that there are three core considerations affecting the 2012 Olympics and Paralympics. The first are the competitors—the athletes who compete in the Games. That is why we have the Olympics in the first place, although sometimes when one listens to debates one wonders whether other people realise that. The second core consideration is the security of those athletes and of those who watch them in ever more threatening times. The third is the ability of athletes and spectators to get with ease to all the venues. I am thinking not just of the Olympic Park in east London, which is what we hear about most of the time, but of all the other venues to which people will wish to go.

On the first core issue—the athletes—I must declare my interest as a member of the advisory board of the British Olympic Association. I am convinced that athletes’ interests have been constantly advanced by the British Olympic Association under the chairmanship of my noble friend Lord Moynihan—whose speech we look forward to almost as much as we do to the maiden speech that is coming down the track from the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, which is why so many of us are in the House this afternoon—and, in relation to the staging of the competition itself, under the chairmanship of my noble friend Lord Coe. We could not be in better hands than those of those two great Olympians.

Secondly, I am very far from convinced that the previous Government’s legacy on Olympic security is good. The noble Lord, Lord Shutt of Greetland—my noble coalition partner—made only a short mention of security; we heard almost as much about the wonders of the two Olympic mascots, Mandeville and Wenlock. I think that security may deserve greater consideration, so I shall now give it that consideration. I was lost in admiration at the persistence of my noble friend Lady Neville-Jones, now the Minister for Security in the Home Office, in trying to extract information on these issues from the then Security Minister, the noble Lord, Lord West of Spithead, who is not in the House this afternoon. The Minister winding up will be relieved to hear that I do not hold him responsible in any way for the noble Lord, Lord West of Spithead.

I think we all share the pleasure in the fact that the Winter Olympics 2010 passed off in Vancouver and elsewhere without any serious security incident. Many congratulations to the Canadian Government on this great achievement, which was, however, costly. The Canadian Government’s original planning assumption was that 175 million Canadian dollars would be spent on security at the Winter Olympics. That grew in predicted cash expenditure to around 1 billion Canadian dollars by the eve of the Games. I think that figure will have grown considerably because of the extra military deployed around the Games themselves.

We must now turn our attention to the protection that is needed in London. Much has already been spent in the run-up to 2012 on security precautions. I pay tribute to John Armitt and his colleagues in the Olympic Delivery Authority and the precautionary actions they have taken against the insertion of latent explosive devices in the pipe work of the buildings in east London. I hope that exactly the same precautions are being taken—here I seek reassurance from the noble Lord, Lord Shutt of Greetland—in any building activities at any other Olympic venue. The fact that there are so many different venues is something that will present opportunities for those who wish to disturb the Games in different ways. In the mean time, while we all welcome the fact that the Olympic Park in east London has been brought in on time, it will be empty for a long period and there will be considerable cost associated with the successful guarding of the venue.

Once the Games commence, the opportunities for attack are manifest, probably much more tempting at the secondary venues, and even more so at the training camps, where athletes will be in the run-up to the Games. Thus, while the high level of security at the Olympic Park is welcome and evident, the other venues are, in part, at present, on all the publicly available information that we have, wide open to severe security risk. This is something to which those with responsibility in this area must turn. I do not believe that it was looked at seriously at all by the last Administration. We all think about explosives; we just heard about improvised explosive devices when my noble friend repeated the Prime Minister’s Statement from another place. However, I am advised that the threat represented by explosive devices can be nothing compared to the threats represented by ICDs—those improvised chemical devices that have not yet been successfully used at any great sporting event, largely due to good chemical prevention plans. There will doubtless be lessons to be learnt about these preventive strategies from Vancouver 2010. In the mean time, the classic model remains how apparent specific threats in the run-up to the football World Cup in 2006 were dealt with by the German authorities. I commend their approach to their chemical surveillance plan—which was barely noticed by visiting spectators—to those concerned with trying to prevent any use of ICDs in the Olympic Park, at secondary venues or in training camps.

Finally, I come to transport. We should all remember, again, the dreadful Dome experience of the last Labour Government—not just for its inability to set the Thames on fire as promised, but its total inability to get people to a venue with ease, most notably on the first night, with the poor VIPs struggling to get in and those endless queues. Transport for London and our mayor bear a heavy responsibility and burden in getting spectators in and out while ensuring that the rest of London gets about its daily business unaffected. That is an issue on which many a London taxi driver has given me their opinion in recent weeks and months, generally starting, “I dunno, guv”, and going on in ways that many noble Lords can imagine.

So far, so good; doubtless security on different transport modes such as rail or bus is being considered just as much as it is at the perimeters of venues large and small. However, the timing is misfortunate as these transport issues are likely to be highly politicised in the run-up to the Games given the cauldron of London politics and the fact that the run-up to the Games is paralleled by the run-up to the 2012 mayoral elections. Transport and transport issues will probably break out of the cosy bands of bipartisanship that link us in your Lordships' Chamber and another place, and doubtless in the mayoral elections. I suspect that politics will out. Amidst all the attention on transport delivery, we also have to consider ticketing. Ticketing is vital—this is my last point—because there is a potential threat of cyber attack on transport infrastructure ticketing as there is on ticketing in the park and the subsidiary venues. The previous Government badly lagged in their efforts to achieve a properly integrated national cyber security strategy. I am far from convinced that we have our defences up to deal with these issues. If my noble coalition partner Lord Shutt of Greetland has time to answer that point, I should very much welcome assurances that security issues at secondary venues and training camps are being taken just as seriously, and that we are looking hard at how we mount our defences against cyber attacks on ticketing of anything from buses and trains to hotels and getting in and out of the Games themselves.