Clause 4 - General functions
London Olympics Bill
3:45 pm
Richard Caborn (Minister of State (Sport), Department for Culture, Media & Sport; Sheffield Central, Labour)
I am not going to take a stab at that; I have a view, but I do not want to put it on record. Even my officials looked a little dumbfounded when they heard the question, so I shall reply to the Committee in writing.
My hon. Friend the Member for Sittingbourne and Sheppey spoke of the legacy of the games. First, the games is not simply a great sports festival lasting for four or five weeks; it is a major sporting project that will deliver a number of agendas. On the human agenda, through the good efforts of my hon. Friend and others, there will be something like 70,000 volunteers. I look back to Manchester, and some of the fantastic stories of the volunteers from those games. Indeed, it was the volunteers who made Manchester so special. Those who watched the Commonwealth games—it was watched internationally—saw them selling their city and their region with pride and passion.
I heard some great human stories about Manchester. Young unemployed people joined the volunteer programme, and others joined for all sort of reasons. That discipline, work and experience allowed them to find employment, and they are still employed. A whole series of things could result. I remember walking into the volunteers' room at Manchester and meeting three middle-aged couples. They were all retired professional people who had been working voluntarily seven days a week. It was near the end of the games, and they told me that, for the previous 18 months, they had put a tremendous amount into the games and did not know what they would do with their lives afterwards. There are many human stories like that. The games enriched not only those people's lives, but their city and their region. We have to capture and manage that feeling and make sure that it expresses itself in our communities in the form of volunteering. However, we have not been very good at doing so. When I went into the volunteers' room, I saw that it was not about money for them; all they wanted was a thank you. We occasionally forget that saying ''Thank you very much for your contribution'' would go a long way. The volunteering programme offers great opportunities.
There are other great opportunities. My hon. Friend the Member for West Ham spoke about what was in this for the locality; if the games do not lift the skills base in the east end of London, we will have failed. That is one of the benchmarks that we have to use. We shall insist that the ODA looks at the skills base because it is very important. We have already started trying to involve the skills sector, but as the learning and skills councils know very well, it is not easy to train people up. The games might seem a long way away now, with six or seven years to go, but it is difficult to upskill a lot of people in that time. None the less, there is a great opportunity to bring people in, including those from the Bangladeshi community, which is one of the least skilled. It is a matter of how we manage that. The ODA will have a major responsibility, and one measurement of its success or failure will be whether it upskills that part of the east end of London.
Let me deal now with the nations and regions. Credit is due to everyone involved, including those in Scotland. When we went to make the final bid, we wanted 1 million people to have signed up to it, but something like 3 million had done so. We went round doing the opinion polls and the focus groups, and some of the strongest support for the bid was in Scotland. It was well above 80 per cent., which was quite remarkable. Right across the nation, the percentage of people supporting the bid was into the eighties. That came about in part because of the nations and regions support group, under the able chairmanship of Charles Allen. It allowed that support to manifest itself in a way that had an effect in our winning the bid on 6 July—we should make no mistake about that.
We want to transform that work now, and I am working with Charles Allen on responsibility for the nations and regions. I shall not go into that now, but we will be having a co-ordinator for each region. The issues involved include tourism, the supply chain, holding camps and the cultural festival, all of which will ensure that this is truly a British project, not a London one. There will clearly be a concentration of benefits in London, and that is right, if that is where events are held, but there are great opportunities to make sure that we spread the benefits, and the ODA will have responsibility for that.
Another legacy will come out of this. We have all been talking about stadiums and sports facilities in this country and worldwide. However, if we look at major sporting events such as the World cup, the Commonwealth games—I think we were successful in that case—and the Olympics, we see that there has not been a good legacy of using buildings and facilities afterwards. Indeed, the record is not good in sport per se. The great challenge that we face is how to use stadiums and sports facilities in a multipurpose way. How do we make them transportable and adaptable?
We transformed the athletics stadium in Manchester into a football stadium. That had to be planned at the design stage, because we could not have done it as an afterthought. Immediately after the Commonwealth games in Manchester were on Five Live, we were digging up the track on which Paula Radcliffe won her fantastic victory and sticking a football team called Manchester City on it. I know that there are one or two Manchester City fans here, and the club now has a ground. That project has played a major role in the regeneration of the east end of Manchester.
Just think about the national stadium that we are going to build now. It is going to be an 80,000-seater to start with. The design brief that is going out is to bring it down to a 20,000-seater so that it can be a great athletics stadium. It will then move back to being a 40,000-seater so that it can host a Commonwealth games or an event staged by the International Association of Athletics Federations. That is possible. What with the design skill, architects and materials now available, I think that by 2012 we can make great advances.
Let us think about 50 m pools; we believe that some of those can be transported around the country. Let us think about the arenas; we believe that they can be designed to be not only multipurpose, but transportable. These are the challenges that we will give to the civil engineers, architects, designers and materials providers. That is why it is so important that we deal with this Bill as quickly as possible, and get the best people in the world on to the ODA, driving the project team. In the medium term, what we are doing could make the Olympics affordable for developing countries. At the moment there is a real fear, which Jacques Rogge and I share, that they are only for the rich countries. If the Olympics ever become that, we will be failing the Olympic ideal. That is why I genuinely and passionately believe that we have a contribution to make to sport in the widest context, and that we must drive sport to deliver on a whole series of agendas connected with the Olympic bid.