London Olympics Bill

I do not have that breakdown, but I will get it for my hon. Friend. Given TimeBank’s existing work—for example, it carries out all the mentoring on behalf of the Home Office for families who take in asylum seekers—I am sure that the strength and commitment of its team will be satisfactory, but I will obtain the figures and place them in the Library. Like everyone else, I congratulate the team. Seb Coe, Keith Mills, Mike Lee and Alan Pascoe have done well, but two people have not been given enough credit. The first is my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State who had the unenviable task, three years ago, of convincing a rather sceptical Cabinet that the bid was worth while, but to her great credit, she gathered support and did so. We must not forget that. The second person was one of our ambassadors in Singapore, who, so my spies tell me, was doing the rounds with great élan: the Prime Minister’s wife was corralling many members of the IOC and introducing the Prime Minister to them. The campaign was very much like a general election campaign—that is where some of the other bid teams got things wrong—where the last four days are critical. We got the last four days right and France did not. That was the key, so we should also commend the Prime Minister’s wife. I was lucky enough to see the Sydney bid at close hand, as I visited Sydney twice before the games. I made a post-games visit to Athens as part of my Select Committee work. Making such a bid is like a couple of entrepreneurs setting up a start-up company: they have got to the starting line and obtained their money—in this case, we have been awarded the games. There is then a rather difficult situation, after the initial public offering, in that the management of the company last only for the next 18 months and, because they cannot cope with managing a brand-new company, are replaced by professionals. We should not be surprised if the current management team is not the same in 18 months’ time. That is normal and we should expect it. The key thing is to ensure that the ODA understands how companies are built and developed, and that the appointment of people to the management team is critical. I realise that the Secretary of State will make those decisions, but we need to understand that members of the management team will need to be replaced, not at regular intervals, but in two or three years’ time. Two things worry me, and they have been raised by other Members. The first is security. There was a hijacking at the Munich games in 1972 and a bomb at Atlanta in 1996. Greece did not expect expenses for security of £2 billion, which it had to take on the hip. The Athens games cost the Greek Government 10 per cent. of gross domestic product. In any normal economy, that would be overwhelming. Given the problems that face any major world event, security is critical and I do not really see why it should always fall on the home team to provide the money. The IOC is a very rich organisation indeed—it will probably take between £20 billion and £30 billion in TV fees over the next 10 years—and although it is generous in giving at least $1 billion to the host city, I do not see why there should not be a separate fee for security, and we need to argue for that between now and 2012. Secondly—I will not be popular for saying this—we must look again at how this matter is managed in the House. We did have a Minister without Portfolio whose only portfolio was managing the dome. The dome was built on time and to budget. It was popular with some people. The only thing that did not materialise was our 12 million visitors—we only got 6.8 million. Everyone who told us that we would get 12 million was wrong, including every tourism expert and everyone from British Airways. If we can have a Minister for a rather minor event like the millennium dome, it seems to me that, as we grow our expertise in the Olympics, we need a Secretary of State for the Olympics, or a dedicated Minister for the Olympics only. That is very important. The current Secretary of State has wide responsibilities. She not only has the Department for Culture, Media and Sport but she is Minister for Women too. As this complex, difficult area develops, the Government should look specifically at establishing a Minister for the Olympics. The ODA will report to Parliament and it will be required to send an annual report to the Secretary of State. I wonder whether we might beef that up. It is critical that the Government find time every year for the House to debate that report, as other hon. Members have said. I say that because I chaired a meeting two weeks before Singapore on the design implications of the Olympics. About 100 designers attended and the Minister for Sport and Tourism was there. One aspect made me nervous, and it has been raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Islington, North (Jeremy Corbyn), who is no longer present: housing. In essence, so far the housing looks to be rather like Le Corbusier and the 1950s high-rises that went up in south and north London that we are now blowing up and taking down. We could be much more Port Sunlight, New Earswick and Welwyn Garden City. We need a very different approach on this and, if we go for high-density, cheap housing, we will deeply regret it within 10 years. It will not be the site that we think it is in legacy values. That is why there should be a way for hon. Members to feed our expertise into the system. In The Observer last Sunday, there was an interesting article by Tim Payton, in which he floated the idea of Olympic parks across Britain. I am greatly attracted by that idea. We are all struggling in our constituencies, wondering which 1 per cent., or 1 per cent. of 1 per cent., we can get of the big budget of the Olympics. We are struggling to find out how we can participate if we are not a London borough. I just wonder whether the Olympic parks might be a good idea. I wonder whether we can persuade the Minister to look at that 12p in the pound of the lottery that currently goes to the Treasury. Although £750 million from the lottery will be made available for the games, a hell of a lot of money is still going to the Treasury from that 12p. Could we make that a bond that could go into the market to develop the Olympic park idea, so that if we beefed up the regional development agencies’ interest in this whole procedure, we could at least give some of the money from the 12p to each RDA, to make some sort of infrastructure facility bid? I live in Kent. We are the largest local authority. We do not have a single Olympic event. We do not have any facility that could host an American team or a Japanese team, and therefore we shall need to come for money.