A year and a half after London won the Games, are we winning the race to deliver on time and on price?
I jumped for joy – and wrote about my jubilation in Rising East 3 – when London got the Games. In the 18 months since the announcement, IOC inspectors have visited London twice to monitor preparations and progress. On both occasions the London Olympic team got pats on the back: infrastructure development is progressing rapidly and expenditure is within limits.
Despite the positive tone of IOC reports, there are concerns that the venues will not be completed on time. Just look at Wembley, people say. In response, the London Olympic team has drafted in CLM, a British American consortium that specialises in the development of Olympic venues.
Concern is mounting about the cost of the Games. Whereas the initial cost was £2.4 billion and £1 billion for regeneration projects, Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell recently told MPs that the infrastructure would require an additional £900m. The likelihood is that Londoners will have to pay more council tax – an even greater premium than originally predicted. Londoners had been asked to provide £675m of the original £2.4 billion: for all council tax payers, roughly £20 on their annual bill for the next 12 years.
East Londoners expressed mixed feelings when I asked them about the show so far.
“The Games are good for the area of East London as it is very poor,” said Joe from Charlton. “The Olympics will bring wealth to this part of London. However, I am worried about after the Games and the venues and buildings being left as white elephants.” He added: “The Olympics will bring unity and it puts us on the world stage, so having the Olympics is great for London and we deserve to host it. But in terms of tax, I am disgusted at having to pay more council tax.”
Anthony, also from south-east London, said: “I am proud and it’s good to a certain degree, but I went to Barcelona and the Olympic village is just a ghost town. If it is well managed then it could be a great event. We’ll have to wait and see, I guess!”
“I am in two minds about the Olympics,” said Amanda, who lives in Stratford. “On one side I am excited about it coming as I live in Stratford, but being a Londoner means I will have to pay more taxes which is not good. It’s a catch 22, really.”
Lloyd, also from Stratford, thought differently: “It’s good for the redevelopment of my part of East London. This could also lead to neighbouring areas being redeveloped. My major concern is the possible overcrowding and potential violence. That needs to be addressed.”
These residents all expressed a sense of excitement at the prospect of the Games. In tax terms, they were not happy about paying extra but seemed to accept it – so long as council tax rises are kept within limits. It seems as if many people are watching the organisers carefully, not expecting a costly failure, but not ruling it out either.
The clock is ticking and the race is on.
Greg Pryke wants to be a sports journalist
I want to repeat what Sir Roy McNulty, our acting chairman, said to the London Assembly in November. Firstly that the ODA’s immediate work programme has not been affected in any way whatsoever by the fact that our budget hasn’t yet been agreed, and, secondly, that the costs are not going up on an exponential basis. If the ODA is given, reasonably soon, the budget that we’ve asked for plus an adequate contingency, then we’re confident that we can deliver the ODA’s programme within that budget.
I want us to think about the Games as the Regeneration Games, a chance to change forever a part of East London that really deserves the level of investment that will come, and it will only come because the Olympics will be the catalyst for that level of investment
Three of the four Olympic boroughs are in the 10 most deprived boroughs in the country. Within the Olympic boroughs, 40 per cent of the population are classified as in a state of worklessness and therefore not participating actively in employment. Look at the level of life expectancy: if you start on the Jubilee Line, for every stop that you come out towards the Lea Valley, you effectively lose a year in your expectation of life. So it’s six to seven years lower life expectancy for people who live in the Lea Valley, as compared to, say, Westminster. This is a valley that by any statistic is deprived and has levels of deprivation that are unacceptable.
The level of social challenge in this valley is deeply ingrained and it’s ingrained in the current personality of the area. What is the economic cost of this level of deprivation, the cost of sustained inequality? What pressure does this inequality place on public infrastructure, health services, policing and social services? It’s important to note that the Games aren’t going to be a magic wand that will instantly change this area. However, they are going to be the catalyst and in my mind, the only catalyst, that will change this area the fundamental way which is needed.
So the value of the Games is that it will act as a catalyst for the social and economic regeneration of the Valley. What is the scale in what we are achieving there? Ultimately the Lea Valley will be 40,000 new homes, a city the size of Exeter in that area; new schools, community and health facilities. Stratford City which is the centre of the Lea Valley will become a major new town and business centre; a shopping centre of 1.5 million square feet, including John Lewis; two million square metres of office space in the main site of Stratford itself: one of the largest new towns in Europe in terms of leisure facilities and park facilities – the biggest park in over 150 years.
One of the great issues of the Valley is its economic sustainability and those figures of worklessness. The Games will create 7000 full time jobs during the construction of the Games site itself, and we’re expecting around the same from the development of Stratford. 12, 000 jobs created from legacy development in the Olympic Park area itself.
The important point to understand now is that in terms of overall programming and delivering, we are hitting all our major milestones. Importantly, at the beginning of 2006, we took a decision to stop the process to do significant planning. The programme mantra which Jack Lemley initiated, 2-4-1 – two years of overall planning, has allowed us to review the entire planning for the Games. The Olympic land, the CPO process, we expect to be complete by the end of this calendar year (2006), which is on track with our schedule to get occupation of the major Olympic site by June 2007. The negotiation, the deal at the end of 2005 with Stratford City, facilitated the integration of the Olympic Village with the Stratford City development.
We’ve carried out a lot of changes to the Olympic plan over the last nine months as we’ve made it better and we’ve enhanced the Olympic programme from a legacy point of view. Importantly, those changes have not cost any more money. They have made the plan more fit for purpose from a legacy point of view, but they’ve also reduced risk. We’ve made decisions very early in the programme which flow through to benefits in terms of the reduction of risk in the delivery of the Olympics later on.
As we look at the Games, look at the big picture. I was in Barcelona recently and the great thing which Barcelona identified at the start, is that the Olympics are a global brand. It’s probably the biggest global brand. Between four and five billion people will watch London 2012 and in the year leading up to it, it will be the biggest business destination. So London has to have a vision to match the global brand that is the Olympics, and take it forward. The regeneration of the Lea Valley in six years is something that would never have been achieved without the Olympics; we need to use it as a catalyst. We need to consider the value that we are going to create, we need to consider the value and balance it with cost.
David Higgins is chief executive of the Olympic Delivery Authority. These are edited extracts from his speech to the Thames Gateway Forum at London Excel on 22nd November 2006 www.thamesgatewayforum.com
With six years to go until the Games come to this part of London, on 23rd November I asked Stratford residents what they thought of recent developments. Some sounded worried: they seemed to have lost faith in those preparing for the Games. News of a £900m budget hike led to criticism from council tax payers. ‘I don’t know where this money is going or what benefits I will see,’ said one.
Despite initial optimism there have been enough media horror stories of late to prompt comparison with the ill-fated Millennium Dome. But not everyone was so negative. “We haven’t really seen the effects of this thing yet,” reported one Stratford resident. “But I think as we get closer this area will change a lot.”
I spoke to a student, originally from Manchester, who has moved down to live in Stratford. When I mentioned escalating costs, she joked that these things only happen in London: “In the 2002 Commonwealth Games in Manchester, everything ran so smoothly and everything was built cheaply and on time.” She was one of a number of people who said the Games should not be held in just one city; instead they should be spread around to showcase the whole nation.
Of those people I spoke to, about 10 per cent were not based permanently in London and they all made an economic case for dispersing the Games across the UK: this would allow existing high quality stadia to be utilised, they said, thereby reducing construction costs.
Long-term locals thought differently. “It’s about time Stratford had some money thrown at it,” declared one. “It’ll be great for us and great for the young people.”
The positive effects of tourism were also widely recognised. But the upbeat mood of 18 months ago is already muted.
Sam Bulpitt is studying Journalism
When the British Olympic Association came to see me in 2001 and said, would I back the Games?, I said yes, as long as it was in the East End. Because they were looking both at the site we eventually went for but also around Wembley, and the site around Wembley involved the construction of temporary housing and much more facilities of a temporary nature.
The reason I wanted specifically to go for the East End, is I didn’t believe that myself or any other mayor would ever be able in one go to persuade any government to unlock the long-term commitment of billions of pounds of public money needed to regenerate, to decontaminate and to put power lines underground, to put in the infrastructure, to plan the schools, plan the hospitals and so on.
The total cost of really getting on with Thames Gateway would always be daunting for any government but the Olympics puts a sword of Damocles balancing just over the head of whoever is in government or whoever is mayor; and, having put in the infrastructure for the Olympic Games, having built the East London line, having extended the DLR, and – I’m confident in the years that follow the Games – having built a CrossRail through to Custom House, then you are in a position where you’re mad, having put that stuff in, not to go on and really press ahead with the whole of the Thames Gateway.
We have made incredible progress in the last year with the CrossRail Bill going through committee. We’ve got very good progress on scoping down the costs so that this is an affordable project, and I have not the slightest doubt that it will be built, if only because it is essential to the continuing development of London. If there is a CrossRail station just here at Custom House, and all those DLR lines coming from Barking Reach and parts of the East End where we will be building and you will be building new homes and work opportunities, they will be able to get off the DLR at Custom House, walk across the platform and be in the heart of the financial district within five or six minutes.
That dramatically improves the amount of development we can have in the Gateway because we are putting in the transport infrastructure and the reason the government has come so far towards accepting CrossRail is if we don’t do that then we will reach a point, at the end of this decade or early in the new decade, where the transport capacity in London is full; and that would constrain all future development whether for office accommodation or housing.
A word about the Olympics and costs. Immediately after we won the Games, the newspapers were filled with all the wonderful stories of rather nationalistic tone about us and the French and so on, but IOC president Jacques Rogge said to Tessa Jowell and myself, it’s absolutely wonderful coverage and that’s the last you’re going to get for the next seven years. And we all knew this: it’s part of the game that you get year after year of predicted doom and gloom.
The reality is that the budget we set is still on schedule and it would be surprising if it wasn’t because we haven’t even got tenders in for the construction of the stadia, and therefore a vast amount of what we’re seeing now is general prediction, assumption and guesstimate. We have been working with all the players involved to totally re-cast the budget, to re-scope the whole scheme to make the maximum savings. That work will be finished in spring, and that budget will then deliver the Games we have actually announced.
We have already reduced the footprint of the Games in order to minimise the number of CPOs and the land assembly. We’ve changed much of the internal layout of the site. The original plan was that the press centre and the tv media centre, two separate centres, would be temporary venues to be demolished. We’ve relocated them to parts of the site where they can have a long term impact. They won’t now be demolished. They’ll be built to a higher standard, and they will then be sold as high class and hi-tech bases for, in particular, the electronic media.
We’ve been going round looking at all those sorts of things, trying to make sure that we get a stronger and stronger legacy. So, don’t get into a great panic. Don’t join in the general doom and gloom of the media, because if you actually track it, all that we’re getting at the moment is one of my opponents after another, largely members of the London Assembly or vermin in the Mail or Express and so on, just increasing the previous prediction by another two or three billion. And there’s a very good way to plot it: the rate of increase in predictions of Olympic costs by people who have access to absolutely no information about it at all, is such that by the middle of 2007 the predictions will exceed the gross domestic product of Britain.
We will have for you a sustainable budget by spring. But this is clearly a part of unleashing the Thames Gateway. Whatever the cost of the Olympics, the legacy has meant that after 30 years’ neglect by all governments, East London is being rebuilt.
Ken Livingstone is Mayor of London. These are edited extracts from his speech to the Thames Gateway Forum at London Excel on 23rd November 2006 www.thamesgatewayforum.com
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The views, they are completely different. None of this was here, it was just wasteland:
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