Olympic Games 2012: Tickets

Lord Moynihan Excerpts

Monday 4th July 2011 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Garden of Frognal]

My Lords, the government allocation is 8,815 tickets, which is 0.1 per cent of the tickets available. I will not go into the detail of how that breaks down at the moment. On the allocation of the tickets, no one had ever before attempted to sell 3 million tickets at one go. Trying to weight applications would have added a layer of complexity which would have made the whole thing almost impossible. LOCOG had no way of knowing how many applications would come in, so it followed other rules rather than the weighting one.

[Lord Moynihan]

My Lords, while all of us associated with the London Games have, I believe, the humility to recognise that public expectation setting regarding tickets was unduly high and that lessons can be learnt, would the Minister nevertheless agree that it is welcome news that the British Olympic Association has secured the right to buy two tickets for every living British Olympian for their own sport and two further tickets for other sports and that many volunteers will benefit from the decision of Olympic governing bodies of sport to use a substantial part of their allocations for athletes, families, friends, supporters and, above, all volunteers?