2012 Olympics (Legacy)

Lord Foster of Bath Excerpts

Tuesday 21st December 2010 Westminster Hall

[Stephen Timms]

I think that it would be a tragic waste of the investment that has been made and of the superb facility that we saw last night. It would be tragic if the facility was there simply for the brief period of the games. My right hon. Friend is right to underline the importance of retaining what has been achieved, which is impressive.

One thing that struck me at last night’s ceremony was the strength of local support for, and engagement with, what is happening in the Olympic park. Tessa Sanderson was there with a group of local young people who are training at her academy to compete in the 2012 games, and other local interests were also present. I hope that that local commitment will be harnessed to make the most of the stadium’s future with the existing building. We should not tear it down and start again, and the West Ham bid is best placed to achieve that.

West Ham’s Upton Park ground is in my constituency, and, as a local resident, I will be sad to see it go after more than 100 years. However, access to the new venue will be much better, especially by public transport, and the existing site could be redeveloped in a way that would strengthen the local community and the neighbouring shopping centre in Green street. The site would be very restricted if the club envisaged further development.

Thirdly, the West Ham bid makes business sense. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Tottenham (Mr Lammy) pointed out, it does not involve tearing down a structure built with substantial public investment. The capital costs that the project would entail would be met from a combination of the funding made available by the Olympic Delivery Authority, the receipts from the disposal of the current ground at Upton Park and a loan facility provided through Newham council—not a grant, as has been suggested in some quarters, but a loan. The club has been able to show how it will meet its continuing liabilities, even in the highly unlikely event that its recent run of poor results continues and it spends next season in the championship, which I hope will not happen. For all three reasons—honouring our Olympic commitments, achieving a local solution and because the bid makes business sense—I hope that the West Ham bid for the future use of the stadium is successful.

Finally, I want to comment on the sporting legacy of the Olympic games, and the partial U-turn we saw from the Government yesterday when they reinstated at least some of the funding for school sport partnerships. We all agree that inspiring and supporting young people to be active in sport should be—must be—one of the biggest prizes from the 2012 games. It is welcome that the Government will not withdraw the funding entirely, following protests from schools and sports people, but it looks as though there will still be a drastic cut in funding for school sports—I have heard suggestions of an 80% cut.

[Mr Don Foster (Bath) (LD)]

If I get the opportunity to catch your eye, Miss McIntosh, I will comment on the right hon. Gentleman’s earlier remarks, but on the school sport partnerships, does he accept that he might be slightly misrepresenting the situation? He has failed to take into account that by removing the ring fence that was applied to school sport partnerships, some of the money that was originally there has gone into schools, and, therefore, will still be available for them to buy into the network. We all agree that it was right to preserve the funding in the form that it is now in.

[Stephen Timms]

I agree with the hon. Gentleman’s last point about the importance of retaining the partnerships, but I do not and cannot share his confidence that the funding will be used in the way he suggests. The Minister might be able to shed some light on this, but I gather that funding for some specialist sports, such as judo, boxing and fencing, may be removed altogether, which would substantially reduce the choice of sport available to young people. The concern that I put to the hon. Member for Bath (Mr Foster) is that confidence has been damaged because the funding is not secure. I am told by schools in my area that the confidence in the arrangements has been quite badly undermined, and it is not clear that yesterday’s announcement will repair it. I hope that it will, at least partially, but it is not clear that it has.

The co-ordination resource for the network of more than 1.5 million young people involved in sports leadership and volunteering appears also to be under threat. It is impressive that the number of sports volunteers almost doubled in the past three years, thanks to policies that my right hon. Friend the Member for Dulwich and West Norwood put in place, but it is hard to see how what has happened can do anything other than constrain that important element of the Olympic legacy.

I have been speaking to the head teacher of Langdon school in my constituency, which is a successful sports specialist college that my right hon. Friend the Member for Dulwich and West Norwood knows. Ten years ago, it was a pioneer for the school sport partnerships, and a large group of young people from that school was part of the London bid team at the meeting of the International Olympic Committee in Singapore in July 2005. My right hon. Friend will acknowledge that their youthful enthusiasm, showcasing the diversity of today’s young London, played an important part in winning the games for the United Kingdom. Today, Langdon is part of a thriving sport partnership of seven secondary schools and 30 primary schools. The benefits of the partnerships are not just sporting in nature; there is close work with feeder primary schools to support children in their academic work, particularly in the primary to secondary transition. The partnership also strengthens the ties between the schools and sports clubs in the community. It supports inter-school competitions. I have heard some criticisms that the partnership has not supported inter-school competitions. The partnership to which I am referring certainly has a large number of competitive inter-school events as part of it. It has coaching programmes to help senior students to gain skills and qualifications for future sports leadership roles.

The head teacher of Langdon, Dr Tabassum, wrote to the Prime Minister 10 days ago, making the point:

“As for the Olympic legacy, we can only fully realise the potential of London 2012 and the inspiration it offers by maximising the development systems that we have been creating and developing over the past decade through our established Schools Sports Partnerships.”

Of course, the school welcomes the reinstatement since that letter was written of some of the funding, although it is not yet clear to it how much of the activity can be retained. Dr Tabassum makes the point that announcing a complete withdrawal of funding was very damaging to the confidence in schools—primary and secondary—in what they had been doing and was damaging to their commitment.

The Olympic games, in 18 months’ time, present a huge opportunity for the UK. It is particularly important that their potential be harnessed to create new opportunities for people living close to the park in east London. In that light, I hope that the West Ham bid for the stadium is successful and that it will be possible for the school programmes, which can underpin the future sporting legacy for the UK, to be sustained after the raid on them over the past couple of months by the Minister’s colleagues in the Department for Education.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Don Foster (Bath) (LD)]

I congratulate the right hon. Member for East Ham (Stephen Timms) on securing the debate and on introducing the important topic of the legacy of the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic games. It is important to stress that both are included; often the Paralympics are overlooked.

The issue of the legacy is crucial because, as the hon. Member for Cities of London and Westminster (Mr Field) said, the Olympics are not about a few exciting weeks of sporting and cultural extravaganza in London and a few other places. They are about the legacy that can come from the work that is being done and has been done; as the hon. Gentleman said, the real judgment about whether we have succeeded will be made in 10 years’ time. I was lucky enough to be in Singapore, and I saw the brilliant work that Seb Coe and his team did in inspiring the world to get behind us, support our bid and ensure our success, when Jacques Rogge pulled London’s name from the envelope—it took him an interminable time to do it. The fact that I and the Minister—who at that time was the Opposition spokesman—were there showed how from the very beginning support for the Olympics and Paralympics has been cross-party. It is important to recognise that although I may have disagreed with the previous Government in some matters, broadly speaking everyone has worked together.

We owe a huge debt of gratitude to the right hon. Member for Dulwich and West Norwood (Tessa Jowell), who in her role as Secretary of State and Olympics Minister did a huge amount of work to drive forward the preparation for the games and to build up the plans for a lasting legacy. The one area that rarely gets touched on, although it featured heavily in the bid—in the inspiring videos referred to by the right hon. Member for Tottenham (Mr Lammy)—is the issue of inspiring the world. Everyone will remember how we made a commitment to use the games to inspire the world to get involved in sporting activity and all the benefits that come from it. The right hon. Lady deserves huge credit for her work in establishing the International Inspiration scheme, which has been so successful, and which helps our work in the aid programme in many places around the world. I have been particularly impressed by something with the awful acronym ICES—the International community Coach Education Standards—which has brought people from all around the world together to share expertise in developing coaching skills. That is part of the legacy that is often forgotten.

The right hon. Member for East Ham put forward a powerful case for the West Ham solution for the future of the stadium. His arguments about the business case and the huge business benefits for his community and the surrounding area were very powerful. However, the most powerful argument of all is the simple one concerning the commitment made at the time of the bid, that there would continue to be an athletics track there, and opportunities for an athletics centre of excellence. The decision is with another body, not the Government, but I hope that the right hon. Gentleman will be successful and that that is the solution that will be reached. It is interesting to hear two Members supporting major football clubs who have both reached the same conclusion, despite representing very different parts of London. The right hon. Gentleman’s case is powerful, but of course we shall have to wait and see. It will be interesting to hear what the Minister has to say.

While we are inspiring people around the world, it is interesting to note that we are still inspiring people in this country. Tens of thousands of people have already given their names as potential volunteers to help during the Olympics and Paralympics. That is very encouraging. Two million people have already registered on the tickets website, which shows that there will be very significant take-up by people from within the UK, who want to come and enjoy the games. However, the legacy is about many things. Of course it is to do with the issue that the right hon. Member for East Ham raised about buildings and what is happening in the east end of London, but we must not forget that there has been regeneration elsewhere as well; for example, in Weymouth, the centre for sailing. That is very important. Also there will be a legacy from the significant improvements being made to transport systems in London. The right hon. Member for Tottenham may have wanted even more, but let us not forget that those improvements will produce a significant legacy.

There will be a real legacy in business and employment, as has already been mentioned. Huge numbers of contracts have gone out through the Olympic Delivery Authority for building the Olympic site and the Olympic village, which in turn will provide the legacy of more affordable housing—urgently needed in that part of London. There are opportunities still to come, even though the site is nearly complete. There will be opportunities in the contracts to be awarded through the London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games and Paralympic Games. In the next 12 months there will be £250 million of contracts, for everything from seating to whistles and DayGlo vests and there will be job opportunities from security to ticketing; the list goes on. There will be a large number of opportunities. What is pleasing is that well over 50% of the £450 million of LOCOG contracts that have already been awarded, or that are being finalised, have gone to small and medium-sized businesses, many of which are in London. That is of real benefit to those businesses. Very pleasingly, 95% of the contracts have gone to organisations, businesses and companies in the United Kingdom; it has been a real opportunity. I was interested to see that even the Royal Mint has got in on the act, with the contract to provide the 2,700 medals that will be needed for the games.

There are a couple of areas of concern. The first is to do with the legacy that we hope to get from tourism. We all understand that we are in financially difficult circumstances. I do not want to argue about who is responsible for that, but we all know the situation. It is understandable that budgets and funding, even to tourism organisations, have had to take their share of cuts. However, there is one thing I am particularly concerned about. The Government, rightly in my view, propose to end the regional development agencies and replace them with local enterprise partnerships. Those will in many cases—they will decide—have responsibility for tourism. Unfortunately, however, we will have a gap between the ending of the work that is being done by the RDAs and the work that will begin to be done by the local enterprise partnerships. In that gap of up to two years, tourism may lose out if action is not taken.

In my region, the South West of England RDA established South West Tourism, which did a lot of important work to promote tourism in our region. However, the contract for that work cannot be renewed and it comes to an end on 31 March 2011, even though the RDA does not end for another 12 months after that. Because the contract cannot be renewed, that work will finish. The South West RDA maintained one responsibility in-house, which was for marketing, including tourism marketing, but because all marketing by the RDA has already ceased, tourism marketing in the south-west has already ceased, too.

There is a real problem with the gap between the ending of the RDAs and the formation of the local enterprise partnerships. What will happen during that gap in respect of tourism, which seems to be crucial in the run-up to 2012?

The other area where I have some concern is the school sport partnerships, although I am delighted that there have been some recent announcements about them, which were referred to by the right hon. Member for East Ham. I am very supportive of the coalition Government, but I stood up in a debate on the Floor of the House to point out that I was deeply concerned that while money was to be transferred to schools through the ending of ring-fencing—something I very much welcome—there was still a problem, in that schools did not know what their budgets were. Therefore, they did not know whether they could use any of that money to support sporting activity, and we would have had a situation where the framework of support provided by the SSPs would have disappeared long before the schools could decide whether to put money into them.

As I said on the Floor of the House, it seemed absolutely critical that we maintained a framework that would enable schools, when they knew what their funding allocation was, to determine whether to put money into SSPs; if not, clearly we would have to look for other solutions anyway. I am pleased that a decision was made to find a way of maintaining that framework.

However, I put it to the Minister that we can still go further to make the network more secure; I genuinely believe that we can do that. The other organisations that are already operating very successfully indeed are the county sports partnerships. In some cases, the SSPs are already linked to the county sports partnerships and it seems to me that we could strengthen the framework for schools to bid into by examining ways of more effectively merging the activities of the county sports partnerships and the SSPs, to enable them to do their incredibly valuable work. More work needs to be done in that regard.

I want to be brief, so I shall end by saying just one more thing. Very often, when we talk about legacy, we do exactly what I have just done; we refer to “legacy” in different pots, whether it is building legacy, transport legacy, tourism legacy or sporting legacy, but very often, the truth is rather different—they are all interlinked. The work that we have been doing in the west of England, where I have the honour to be the co-chair of Team West of England, involves finding ways of integrating all the legacy issues. For example, we have got the British Paralympic Association to use the wonderful facilities at Bath university as their training ground. That has not just been good for Bath university; it has been good for local businesses, hotels and bed and breakfasts, and many other service industries in the area. That project is bringing all these things together.

In the same way, when the very first training camp deal was done by Bristol university to bring the Kenyan team in, the university had a 10-point plan, of which the Kenyan team coming to train in Bristol in the run-up to the 2012 games was the last item. The other items were much more about developing links between Bristol and places in Kenya, including schools links, business links, professional team links and so on. Those are the sorts of things that we can still do and that we need to do much more of. However, I am very optimistic that we shall have a great legacy from what will be a fantastic set of Olympic and Paralympic games in 2012.

[Miss Anne McIntosh (in the Chair)]

We have six minutes left for two speakers, before I call the Front-Bench spokesmen.