London Olympic Games and Paralympic Games (Amendment) Bill
Debate between Mark Field and Hugh Robertson
Mr Field
As a courtesy to the right hon. Lady, I will obviously look at the Hansard for that time, but there is no doubt that this was sold on a very different financial basis, and it will cost not only the general taxpayer, but the London council tax payer, a significant sum of money for some decades to come.
I share the widespread view that the Olympics are a great opportunity to showcase the city that I love—I am very proud to represent the heart of the city—and that they will be a spectacular success. Both the Olympics and the Paralympics shortly afterwards will be a wonderful show. I do have concerns about the issue of the legacy, however, and I suspect that similar debates to that which we are currently having were held in the Greek Parliament in advance of the Athens games in 2004, the Australian Parliament in advance of the 2000 games, and other Parliaments and Federal buildings before other Olympiads took place.
We all know that it is very easy to have great ideas about the legacy going forward. I am well aware of that; I walked through the site where the Olympics will take place before we even won the bid, and I recognised that there were tremendous opportunities for regeneration. I am concerned, however, about whether we will be able to sell that legacy and whether it will be achieved in the way that we have in mind. We will not know that when we look back in the third week of September next year; we will not know the answer until 2020 and beyond. I therefore hope we in this House continue to address the possible prospect of our having a white elephant of a site out in east London. That would be a crying shame not just because of the amount of money being spent on it, but because of the opportunities that might be missed.
I hope that we will ensure that this debate does not end today and that we will not draw a line under things after the Olympics have finished. It will be incumbent on all London Members of Parliament to hold future Administrations very much to account to ensure that that proper legacy, which is the raison d’être for holding the Olympics in London, is put in place.
Hugh Robertson
May I give my hon. Friend some reassurance on this point, because it is very dangerous if the idea he alludes to is allowed to take root? There is absolutely no chance of our being left with white elephants on the park after the Olympic games. The single biggest frustration in my life at the moment is that two London premier league football clubs and one in a lower league are competing to take over the stadiums after the games. That represents an entirely different situation from those in Beijing, Athens and Sydney. The aquatics centre, wonderfully designed by Zaha Hadid, will provide an Olympic-sized swimming pool in a part of London that has simply never had one before. We have just concluded an amazing deal, at more than half a billion pounds, to sell off the private sector part of the athletes village. The public sector part has already been sold to Triathlon Homes. The velodrome, probably the most iconic building on the park—we did not spot that at the beginning—will become a new home for British cycling, which is one of our most successful sports.
Hugh Robertson
I am sorry, Mr Deputy Speaker, if I offended you, and I absolutely take the point you make. I shall simply say that the broadcast media centre is out for contract at the moment and there is fantastic interest. We have the largest new urban park in Europe and a half-a-billion-pound shopping centre. This is a pretty convincing package.
Mr Field
I accept that it is a convincing package. The Minister will be aware of what happened in my constituency with the somewhat missed opportunity of the redevelopment at Paddington basin. A huge amount of work has not resulted in a great success; it has not been the iconic place to live and work that it might have been. I therefore hope that all hon. Members will recognise that the end of the Paralympics is the beginning of the story. Making a great success of the legacy will be in everyone’s interests, not least of those in the constituency of the hon. Member for West Ham (Lyn Brown), given where it is located, and of people who live in the constituencies directly affected.
London Olympic Games and Paralympic Games (Amendment) Bill
Debate between Mark Field and Hugh Robertson(13 years, 5 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text
Hugh Robertson
Given the almost unparalleled level of interest in ticket applications, it is pretty unlikely that anybody who has gone through the process of securing a ticket for London 2012 will not turn up. I think that anybody who has a ticket is disproportionately likely to turn up. We must also remember that these Olympics are different from any others in that 75% of the tickets are available to the general public. There will therefore not be the problems that are seen at some events that have large numbers of corporate seats. We are all well aware of the negative impact that empty stadiums would have. I suspect that we will face the reverse problem and that there will be so much demand for events that there will be a lot of disappointed people who cannot get tickets, and that there will not be empty seats on the day.
Mr Mark Field (Cities of London and Westminster) (Con)
To pick up on that point, will the Minister make clear what arrangements there will be for a secondary market for tickets? I appreciate that there are draconian measures to stop ticket touting, but presumably there will be an opportunity for a legitimate secondary market for those who have applied, in the rather complicated way, and who by July or August 2012 realise that they will not be able to take up their allocation.
Hugh Robertson
I absolutely agree with my hon. Friend. There is the quid pro quo that if one has tough anti-touting regulations, one has to make it as simple as possible for people who buy tickets in the legitimate expectation that they will attend an event, but who then cannot do so, to exchange their tickets and get their money back. That is what happens in major sporting events the world over. There are a number of sporting events across the United Kingdom where that already works well. There is a very good system at Lord’s for test match tickets, and Wimbledon has a smart system in which people hand in their tickets as they go out and they are simply recycled. LOCOG is absolutely clear that there has to be an efficient, easy and simple mechanism for exchanging tickets legitimately in order to discourage touting.
Turning to the business before the House, the London Olympic Games and Paralympic Games Act 2006 sets the legal framework.
Hugh Robertson
My hon. Friend raises an extremely good point, which I will answer peripherally before coming on to the main question. He knows that, like him, I spent a bit of time in the armed services. I am sure that everybody in the House wants to ensure that injured servicemen in particular are properly looked after in this process. We have concluded an agreement that the armed forces will conduct the flag raising at the medal ceremonies, so they will be very much at the centre of the games. The organising committee has also agreed to take on a number of injured servicemen for work experience. We are trying to set up a similar agreement within the Government Olympic Executive. If I remember rightly, although this happened some months back, there was an allocation of tickets through one of the service charities—I think it was Help for Heroes.
Most encouragingly, through the Battle Back programme, a number of servicemen—although not yet servicewomen, but I hope that that will change—have got on to the Paralympic training programmes run by a number of sports as part of their rehabilitation. A couple of months ago, I met two young men in Manchester—one of whom was injured in Iraq and one of whom was injured in Afghanistan—who are training with British Cycling for the Paralympic team. That was impressive and incredibly inspiring, because instead of dwelling on the unfortunate nature of what had happened, they had found a way to move forward through sport. I took Lord Coe to Headley Court last summer, where we found a young Scots Guardsman who had had both his legs and his left arm blown off, and who was hoping to compete in the Paralympics as a javelin thrower. Lord Coe, who despite being a runner knows a bit about javelin throwing, was able to take him through it. I think that he is now about seventh in the world. There is every expectation that as he gets fitter and better, he will have the opportunity to compete in the Paralympics. I am sure that Members from across the House wish all people in that position well.
The 2006 Act sets the legal framework within which organisations such as LOCOG, the Olympic Delivery Authority and the Mayor’s office are empowered to deliver the games. It also provides the legislative means through which we will meet Government commitments given to the International Olympic Committee on how the games and the games environment will be managed. The Act includes powers to regulate advertising and trading in the vicinity of Olympic and Paralympic venues, and to manage traffic on the Olympic route network and around games venues. It also makes the touting of Olympic and Paralympic tickets an offence.
As we move into the operational phase of preparations, building on the excellent work of LOCOG, the ODA, the Government Olympic Executive and others, the Bill brings forward amendments to ensure that the original intention of the legislation can be effectively delivered in practice. This is entirely normal as the delivery of an Olympic games moves through its cycle, and the amendments are small in comparison to those made before previous games. The Bill is limited in scope: it is confined simply to amending sections of the original Act and contains no new issues.
Mr Mark Field
Although I accept, as the Minister says, that the Bill makes minor amendments to the legislation that came in some five years ago, does he share the concern that has been expressed by some constituents, with which I have sympathy, that because of the nature of the agreement with the International Olympic Committee, we risk having almost a state within a state in the vicinity of the Olympic park during August 2012? There will be rights of seizure of infringing articles, essentially to protect the interests of the sponsors who, I accept, have put significant amounts of money into the games. Does he share the concerns about the undermining of fundamental liberties that we all take for granted because of the agreement with the IOC to stage the Olympics here in the UK?
Hugh Robertson
I think the best way of answering that is to say that I note the concerns. There is a fine line, and we knew what we were getting into when we bid for the event in 2004. All of us who supported the bid recognised that there would be one or two uncomfortable moments over matters such as that, but believed that it was worth having those uncomfortable moments for the greater good that would be generated.
We will be the only city in the modern Olympic cycle that has hosted the games three times—we did so in 1908 and 1948, in case Members get caught out at the pub sports quiz. The Olympics will be a fantastic opportunity to showcase this country in a way that almost nothing else can provide. I touch wood as I say this, but there is every chance that they will be a fantastic shop window for this country—not only for our ability to deliver major construction projects but for how we host people, for our tourism industry, for businesses and for sport in this country.
We need only look at the number of sports events that are coming to this country in the wake of London 2012 to realise that the good of hosting the Olympics is incalculable. That is even before we consider the fact that the Olympic park site was the largest industrial wasteland anywhere inside the M25 and it now has a brand-new Westfield shopping development springing up on its doorstep, the largest shopping centre built anywhere in Europe and the only one in which Westfield is investing outside the Australian sub-continent. We can also consider the traffic and transport changes. The price is that when we are staging a world event of such a nature, we have to have restrictions to preserve the £700 million that sponsors have put in. I absolutely acknowledge that that is a little bit uncomfortable, but I think it is a price worth paying for the greater good.
Mr Field
I accept that the 1908 and 1948 Olympics were nothing like as commercialised as next year’s will be. Such commercialism probably goes back to the Olympiads in 1984 in Los Angeles and 1996 in Atlanta. There is a sense that there has been creeping power in the hands of large commercial interests, with ever more draconian measures being put in place. For example, particular brands of soft drink will be barred within a particular radius. Has that always been the case in the modern Olympic era since there has been more commercialisation, or have commercial interests used an increasing amount of strength to ensure that we have the draconian measures that we will debate today?
Hugh Robertson
There is no sense at all that the requirements of the London Olympics are any more draconian than has been the case in immediately preceding games. The starting point for that train of events was the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, which were an advertising free-for-all. One sponsor paid a huge amount to the organising committee to be a tier 1 sponsor, or whatever the equivalent of that was, and then its immediate commercial competitor took one of the teams out for a press conference and emblazoned it with the company’s logos. Those Olympics, with all the ambush marketing around them, led to some of the regulations that now exist.
I am personally very comfortable with the regulations, because the great success of the London Olympics has been in raising more than £700 million from commercial sponsors. That is a remarkable effort in the teeth of the type of recession that we are hopefully just coming out of. To get that amount of money from big multinationals, we have to give them some confidence that their brand is being protected. That is why they have invested the money.
Such regulations are not a particularly Olympic phenomenon. Exactly the same things happen at almost every other major sports event, including a host of events that we are trying to attract to this country. They happen at cricket world cups, and I am pretty sure that they happen even at highly commercial events such as the Indian premier league. Exactly the same regulations apply at football World cups. They are standard, and they are in place to protect the vast amounts of sponsorship income for such events.
Hugh Robertson
There is a distinction between the costs that the hon. Gentleman originally asked about—the costs for enforcement officers—and more general costs. Some of those general costs are covered by the extra funding made available, but others are not, precisely because local authorities knew what they were getting themselves into when they made bids for those events. They knew what the likely cost would be at the bidding stage. It would be ridiculous for anyone who made a bid, for example, for the Olympic sailing event, to say that they did not know that there would be some associated security costs.
Mr Mark Field
Will the Minister clarify the situation in respect of powers of seizure over individuals, rather than powers to deal with corporations? Essentially, is the ODA stepping into the shoes of local authority enforcement departments, or will it use powers other than those that would be exercised by a local council officer?
Hugh Robertson
The answer to that is, “Not quite.” The powers would normally be exercised by the police. Obviously, because of the considerable security obligations on the police at the time of the games, which my hon. Friend will understand, we have decided in the Bill to pass responsibility for enforcement officers to the ODA. The ODA will use only trained people who understand what they are doing and who will act proportionately. The suggestion is that those people are most likely to come from local authorities, which have such enforcement officers anyway. They have the necessary expertise and—I hope—sense of proportionality to carry out those functions satisfactorily.