London Olympic Games and Paralympic Games (Amendment) Bill

There is no sense at all that the requirements of the London Olympics are any more draconian than has been the case in immediately preceding games. The starting point for that train of events was the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, which were an advertising free-for-all. One sponsor paid a huge amount to the organising committee to be a tier 1 sponsor, or whatever the equivalent of that was, and then its immediate commercial competitor took one of the teams out for a press conference and emblazoned it with the company’s logos. Those Olympics, with all the ambush marketing around them, led to some of the regulations that now exist. I am personally very comfortable with the regulations, because the great success of the London Olympics has been in raising more than £700 million from commercial sponsors. That is a remarkable effort in the teeth of the type of recession that we are hopefully just coming out of. To get that amount of money from big multinationals, we have to give them some confidence that their brand is being protected. That is why they have invested the money. Such regulations are not a particularly Olympic phenomenon. Exactly the same things happen at almost every other major sports event, including a host of events that we are trying to attract to this country. They happen at cricket world cups, and I am pretty sure that they happen even at highly commercial events such as the Indian premier league. Exactly the same regulations apply at football World cups. They are standard, and they are in place to protect the vast amounts of sponsorship income for such events.