London Olympics Bill

: I am pleased to follow the hon. Member for Bath (Mr. Foster). However, I noted that he referred to the hon. Member for North Southwark and Bermondsey (Simon Hughes) as an especially fine former mayoral candidate but did not describe the hon. Member for Richmond Park (Susan Kramer) in the same terms. I do not know whether there is some split in the Liberal Democrat party or whether the hon. Member for Bath is trying to curry favour with his president. As the hon. Member for Faversham and Mid-Kent (Hugh Robertson) said, the new clause is predicated on the belief that there will a cost overrun. He gave various reasons for that, such as land values and added security, and argued that those factors have not yet been properly costed. The hon. Member for Perth and North Perthshire (Pete Wishart) denounced his nation’s sporting prowess in declaring that there would be an overrun. If one considers every other country in the world that has held the Olympics, one realises that, when Opposition politicians tried to make political capital by starting to talk about overruns, they made them a political inevitability. The Select Committee on Culture, Media and Sport examined all those countries in detail and found that that was the case. I therefore hope that the debate will not perpetuate the canard that the games must necessarily overrun. The bid model was put together on an extremely robust financial basis and tight analysis was made not only of security and land value issues, and how they might change, but—perhaps most significantly—London Transport’s financial needs. At one point, inadequate provision had been made to ensure that public transport needs in London would be met, but, following the first IOC visit, when its members commented on that, substantial and sufficient adjustments were made.