2012 Olympics (Legacy)

Hugh Robertson Excerpts

Tuesday 21st December 2010 Westminster Hall

[The Minister for Sport and the Olympics (Hugh Robertson)]

I join other Members in congratulating you on your debut appearance in the Chair in this Chamber, Miss McIntosh. No one has mentioned it, but we all ought to congratulate the hon. Member for Bath (Mr Foster) who has just been elevated to the Privy Council.

I add my personal thanks to the right hon. Member for Dulwich and West Norwood (Tessa Jowell) for the extraordinarily constructive and inclusive way she managed the process when she was in charge. The past six months must have been difficult for her; to start a project of that sort, be as closely involved as she was and then, for reasons beyond her control, see it pass to someone else must have been difficult. I simply say that I am grateful to her for everything she did and for the way she has conducted herself since. I also congratulate the right hon. Member for East Ham (Stephen Timms) on securing the debate and on the way he made his points.

Given that time is short, I will try to answer the various questions that have been asked as best I can, rather than read the prepared speech, which I suspect might be rather familiar to the right hon. Lady. The right hon. Member for East Ham should have no fear about the political aspect, if that was a worry behind anything he said. The Olympic Park Legacy Company, chaired by Baroness Ford, is doing a fantastic job. She was appointed by the Government in which the right hon. Gentleman served and is a Labour peer—I think she may be a Cross Bencher now—so he should have no worries on the political front.

The right hon. Gentleman asked some good questions about jobs on the site. There are currently 10,333 people working either on the park or the village, of whom 25% and 29% respectively come from the six host boroughs. Genuine employment opportunities have been created, even before the London Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games brings forward its opportunities, or Westfield starts to recruit for the Stratford City development, which I am told will bring another 20,000 jobs to the area. If those forecasts are correct, the position looks reasonably promising. I enjoyed his suggestion about local residents and a local food court, and hope that he will manage to persuade his borough to take that up.

I absolutely take on board the right hon. Gentleman’s points about school sport. I think that we are all much happier with the position we are in now than the one we were in a week ago. To be fair to the Secretary of State for Education, it was a difficult decision. He had a budget that was subject to a 10% cut and had decided to hand the budgets over to schools, as the hon. Member for Bath noted. Once he had done that and given the schools a 0.1% increase above inflation, he was left with a very small pot, out of which he had to make his 10% cross-departmental cut. At the same time, he was trying to fund the pupil premium, which I guess will benefit many young men and women growing up in the borough of the right hon. Member for East Ham. It was an extremely tight financial settlement, and although I take on board the many points that have been made by the sports lobby, not a single one of them came forward and said, “Save this and cut the other”; it was all, “Save this spending”. Anyone who has had to go through a major deficit reduction plan will know the difficulties involved.

The stadium was the major part of the right hon. Gentleman’s speech. He made a powerful case for West Ham, but I hope that he will not be offended if I say that it was not the first time I have heard that speech, or indeed the counter-offer from north London. He is absolutely right to say that I visited the West Ham community scheme about a year and a half ago when I was in opposition. It is a powerful scheme that does fantastic work in the community, and I pay tribute to it again, as I did at the time.

We are currently in the middle of a legal process, so I am unable to say a great deal more about that now, but I will come on to the dates and who is making the decisions in a moment. Clearly, it is massively to the benefit of the public purse that two extremely good and competitive bids are going forward. If I were to comment in too much detail one way or the other, however, I would open myself up to judicial review. Having been a distinguished Minister in the previous Government, the right hon. Gentleman will know that landing the Government in the High Court is not normally a role for junior Ministers, so I will leave it at that and simply say that the process is ongoing.

My hon. Friend the Member for Cities of London and Westminster (Mr Field) talked about the financial aspects. On the village, I can assure him that there are nine high-quality bids, as the right hon. Member for Dulwich and West Norwood said. I do not think that I am breaking any confidences when I say that that was considerably more than we expected. There is a great deal of interest in what is being built on the park, and almost everyone who goes there is—to use a nasty, modern phrase—blown away by it. There is considerable investor interest in large parts of it, so I hope that my hon. Friend will be reassured. The right hon. Member for Dulwich and West Norwood is right about the hotel rooms; they are not being paid for from the public budget, and many of the bodies occupying them—the international federations and the rest—are simply billed for them. It is not some great state-sponsored beano in which people will be living at the Dorchester at huge public cost.

In a very good speech, the right hon. Member for Tottenham (Mr Lammy) spoke of his passion for the bid. I was lucky enough to be with the hon. Member for Bath and the right hon. Lady in Singapore at the time, and I thank the right hon. Member for Tottenham for the role he played. He made a powerful speech about Tottenham. I hope he will be impressed to know that I have also visited the Tottenham Hotspur community scheme; indeed, he will be doubly impressed to hear that I did so during black history week. There were many people in the stadium at Tottenham studying the very first black player to play for Tottenham.

[Mr Lammy]

Walter Tull.

[Hugh Robertson]

The very man. They had all drawn him, were learning about him and putting that into context. Crucially, I was told that there was a reading skills course, which I think had been running for seven weeks when I visited, and the average literacy age increased by 18 months over that period. It is a fantastic scheme, and the right hon. Gentleman is right to pay tribute to it.

The right hon. Gentleman also asked about the time, but he will appreciate that the remarks I made earlier apply to what I can and cannot say about the process. He is absolutely right that the initial decision will be made by the OPLC board on 28 January. It will then be confirmed, and eventually due diligence will start. I am absolutely sure that some form of deposit or bond will be taken from whichever preferred bidder emerges from that stage, and the decision will then come back to the founder members of the OPLC board—the Department for Communities and Local Government, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport and the Mayor of London. Those three bodies will take on that scheme, and that arrangement was set up under the previous Government. I hope that answers all the right hon. Gentleman’s questions about the process.

[Mr Lammy]

Does the Minister expect that the eventual decision will be a political decision on the recommendation of the trust, some time after 28 January?

[Hugh Robertson]

The current timetable, all being well—clearly that depends on due diligence and the various things that have to be gone through with the preferred bidder—is for the decision to be announced by the end of the financial year, so by the end of the first quarter of 2011. I would imagine that 1 April 2011 would be a good planning date. Like all decisions, it will be a balance; value for public money, the legacy and promises that we have made will all be considered.

The hon. Member for Bath made a customarily good speech. With regard to tourism, he is right to identify the gap between the ending of RDAs and the start of LEPs as a concern. We are looking at that process with the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills. I absolutely take on board his remarks about county sports partnerships. One of the things that has come out of the slightly tortured process of the past three months is the question of whether we are making enough use of CSPs, which tend to vary in quality, depending on the area in which they are sited, who is in them and who is running them. There is certainly room to bring the two closer together.

The hon. Gentleman also touched on international inspiration, which has not formed part of the debate. I do not know how many Members picked it up, but we were able to confirm the full funding from the Department for International Development for the remainder of the International Inspiration scheme, which is a considerable step forward.

I thank the hon. Member for Edmonton (Mr Love) for his contribution. He made the case for Spurs to remain at White Hart Lane. I am probably in danger of overreaching my brief, but I am not sure that that is an option B, as all the information I have seen indicates that Spurs is pursuing that option very seriously indeed. The hon. Member for Ilford South (Mike Gapes) made a powerful case in favour of West Ham, and I wish him well for the Boxing day fixture. Time is running out, so I thank all Members who have spoken in the debate for their contributions, particularly the right hon. Member for East Ham, and wish everyone a happy Christmas.