London Olympic Games and Paralympic Games Bill

moved Amendment No. 2:"Page 31, line 9, at end insert—" ““(   )   The Secretary of State shall appoint the Chair of the London Organising Committee as a member of the Authority.”” The noble Baroness said: In moving the amendment I shall speak also to Amendments Nos. 5 and 6. Amendment No. 4 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville, is also in this group. My amendments deal with the membership of, and other matters relating to, the constitution of the Olympic Delivery Authority. The first amendment proposes that the chair of the London Organising Committee shall be a member of that authority. LOGOC and the ODA have separate responsibilities, but there needs to be co-ordination. The Minister in the Commons said at the first sitting of the Committee on the Bill, in col. 10 of the Official Report, that it was right that the chair of LOGOC had a role in the overall governance of the Olympic project; but he went on to say that that should be through the Olympic board and that the chair should not have a supervisory role over the ODA chair. I am not proposing that, but the Minister talked about the two jobs being complementary. I do not understand from those comments why there was an objection to the chair of LOGOC, or its representative, being part of the ODA to ensure that close working. A formal link would seem appropriate in this case. A complicated diagram is doing the rounds showing those relationships. In practice, a close working relationship goes up through the Olympic board, involving the Secretary of State, the Mayor and the British Olympic Association. Going up through the board and coming back down again seems unnecessarily tortuous and heavy-handed. Amendment No. 5 would leave out paragraphs 7 and 8, which require the approval of the Secretary of State for the appointment of a finance director and director of transport of the ODA. I have tabled Amendments Nos. 5 and 6 to ask the Minister why it is necessary not only to provide that the ODA shall have finance and transport directors, but that they shall be individuals approved by the Secretary of State. I have tabled amendments to be considered later seeking greater understanding of the control that it seems that the Secretary of State will have at every stage of every decision that the ODA will take, but at this point I am asking why the Secretary of State needs to be involved in these two appointments and why, right at the start of the schedule, there is such a distrust of the Secretary of State’s appointees to the board. I would have thought that they would and should get on with the job. Amendment No. 6 is consequential. I beg to move.