Olympic Games 2012: Heritage and Arts Funding

My Lords, I make this speech having returned from a test match where, for those who are interested, the teatime score is 158 for 2 for England. However, there was also much disquiet there about the cuts in grants to grass-roots cricket. During the next few weeks, I shall visit an event at Salisbury Festival, which is in danger of being cancelled next year, after 25 years, because of further cuts in grants. I shall worship in the magnificent Salisbury Cathedral, which will have its funding slashed—one of the great catastrophes of the freeze on English Heritage expenditure. Yet, on Saturday, I shall go to the FA Cup Final at Wembley, an edifice of gross mismanagement and overspend, overseen by this Government. I applaud my noble friend Lord Baker for organising this debate. I also declare an interest as a current and former board member and trustee of several arts museums and organisations, and chairman of a pressure group called the Sports Nexus. The 2012 Olympics receives my full support. I applaud the Government—although I can also criticise them—and my noble friend Lord Coe for bringing the Games to London. But I am afraid that, when the dead hand of government gets involved in a project, it demonstrates its incompetence. We cannot run away from the fact that there have been incompetent budgeting and a failure to learn from the mistakes of other major projects. When budgeting, could anyone in the modern financial world not have taken into consideration building inflation, land price inflation, transport cost inflation and the cost of security? They surely cannot live in London. It would be easy to criticise only the so-called Minister for Culture, but this financial fiasco has the dead hand of the Chancellor on it. It is the Chancellor who is charging VAT of £1 billion, whereas the Commonwealth Games in Manchester did not have to pay VAT, and it is the Chancellor who has had to sanction the original costing and the revised costings at every juncture, having been guided by the Treasury. My goodness, how we look forward to greater things! We have found ourselves in a situation where, as other noble Lords have enunciated in this Chamber, Peter is being robbed to pay Paul. Who are the Peters? They are the Walnut Whip Peters, the London citizens who Ken Livingstone famously said would not have to pay more than the price of a Walnut Whip for the London Olympics. I fancy that we will be charged for a boxful. Then there are the arts Peters, whose spending allocation is about to be frozen: museums, galleries, local community arts initiatives, local sports facilities, grass-roots sports and, of course, our heritage, including 16,000 churches and all our cathedrals, which are totally dependent on the Government and the lottery for money and support. There are also Peters who think that when they buy a lottery ticket the money will go through an independently run venture for distribution to a number of causes. It is hard to imagine that this freezing of expenditure could have affected so many special interest groups. A number of questions remain unanswered. Can the Minister furnish us with the answers? I support my noble friend Lord Baker in asking his question. Miss Tessa Jowell said that £675 million will be venture capital, and that it would be a loan from the lottery. What is that about? If it is a loan, it will need to be paid back, so what are the terms? If it is venture capital, the capital is ventured with a view to making a profit. Can we have a straight edge on this? The Secretary of State talked about the profit from the sale of land after the Olympics. Can we have more details of her plan, and do her recent figures include anticipated profit from the sale to mitigate the cost or will it, in fact, reduce the cost? The much heralded Olympic scratch card was going to raise £750 million in addition to other lottery spending, but recent figures from the National Audit Office show that 80 per cent of the money being raised from scratch cards is to the detriment of other lottery fundraising initiatives. What steps are going to be taken to reverse that trend? I share the concern of my noble friend Lord Baker that we have not seen the end of this spending mismanagement because there is no sound commercial strategy in place to reverse this trend. Can we have a guarantee that this is the final bill? It is a tragedy that an event that cost only £2 billion in Sydney—which many people say was the best Games ever—is currently going to cost nearly five times as much in London. Only in a new Labour world do sport and the arts become worse off as a result of London staging the greatest sporting event on Earth.