Sporting Events Bill [HL]

Lord Mawson Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 24th June 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Moynihan (Con)]

I am in agreement with the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, on these amendments. I think she was very wise to bring this before the Committee, because this is a case where many of the international governing bodies and federations— the IOC in particular—have taken a lead. Without this legislation reflecting that, we would be seen to be behind what are important international obligations set by organisations such as the IOC. I also agree with the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, so there is cross-party support for his amendments. Whether the wording is right and sufficiently enabling is a matter for the Government to consider. I declare my interests. As the Minister knows, in 2012 I was chairman of the British Olympic Association, a member of the London Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games and a member of the Olympic Board.

I will develop my argument and the reasons why. The International Olympic Committee has what it calls sustainability essentials, and any city bidding to host the Games has to meet those sustainability essentials when it bids. It then has a sustainability strategy, which it expects governing bodies around the world and all the national Olympic committees associated with the IOC to follow. When it comes to bidding for major events such as the ones we are talking about this afternoon in the context of this Bill, those who are bidding have to meet exceptionally high standards of sustainability and environmental protection, and it is right that they do.

I declare the fact that I sat on two commissions of the International Olympic Committee considering bids from other cities and then advising the members of the International Olympic Committee on the merits of those bids. One of the critical aspects of that was sustainability and the environment. If a city failed to meet those standards, it was very unlikely to succeed. For that reason, in the very early days of working closely with Ken Livingstone, the British Olympic Association sought to place sustainability right at the heart of the London bid that was judged in 2005. When I complete my remarks I will come on to the exceptionally important point that the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, made about judging the environmental legacy.

All credit should be given in this Committee for the work of Sir John Armitt and the Olympic Delivery Authority. Sir John Armitt is one of the most outstanding men of his generation when it comes to engineering and the work he did as chairman of the Olympic Delivery Authority—the body that organised the building of the venues, facilities and infrastructure for the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games—and the key environmental measures he implemented over several strategic areas, including waste management. He diverted 100% of operational waste away from landfill. An impressive 99% of waste generated from venue construction and decommissioning was reused or recycled.

On energy and emissions—an important point for the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, on every occasion that he contributes to a debate such as this—it was incumbent on the ODA to cut carbon dioxide emissions by at least 20% compared with standard practices, so even where it was expected that we would see reductions, we had to go 20% further. The Olympic park energy centre utilised a combined cooling, heating and power system alongside biomass boilers burning sustainable fuels—far more sustainable than at Drax, I might add. Then there was the sustainable construction. The Olympic Stadium was built to be the most sustainable in Olympic history, repurposing old gas pipes and reducing materials.

Water conservation was important. Water was a serious challenge to the organisers of the Games in 2012, because the quality of the water that we had to achieve was tough to meet. For the organisers of the Games, it took many days of discussions with Thames Water at the time to meet the standards that the International Olympic Committee required in its contract with London to host the Games.

On the biodiversity side, the ODA implemented an Olympic biodiversity action plan to restore local rivers. Everyone knows what the East End of London looked like before the work started to bring the Games to London. They planted over 300,000 wetland plants and installed hundreds of bat and bird boxes.

The noble Baroness, Lady Jones, talked about public transport. It was a requirement that, when it came to hosting in London, we had to design a public transport Games that banned spectator parking at venues and instead relied entirely on public transit, walking and cycling networks to manage emissions.

I mention those as examples, but there are many more. Many committees were put in place to implement one of the most impressive sustainability Games there has ever been. That was made even more difficult at the time because the transformation of the Lower Lea Valley into the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park required the most comprehensive environmental enabling works ever undertaken in the United Kingdom. Before 2007, when the work started, the 246-hectare site was nicknamed “London’s scrapyard”, serving a neglected, heavily polluted brownfield site packed with light industry, active landfills, a soap factory, gasworks and overhead power pylons. A great deal of work was done on site clearance and deconstruction. Over 98% of all demolition materials were recycled and directly reused in the new infrastructure. Workers removed 52 massive overhead electricity pylons and buried 13 kilometres of power cables in deep underground tunnels.

Then there was the green cleaning up: the soil washing. The soil was choked with a century of industrial toxins, including oil, tar, arsenic, lead and cyanide. Soil hospitals were created. The Olympic Delivery Authority, again under Sir John Armitt, set up onsite laboratories and five industrial soil-washing machines. A huge amount of work was done, and I would be very happy to talk at length about it because I am proud of the work that we did in London 2012. The reason for mentioning a number of these examples is to reinforce how import it is that, with legislation of this kind, when we are sending a signal to the world of sport that we want these major events to come, and they are going to pick up this Act, as hopefully it will then be, and look at it, if they do not see a real commitment to environmental sustainability on the face of the measure, they will question why, especially since we cover so many other aspects.

We need to find the right words that make it enabling. We must not be too prescriptive, because the prescription may be even tougher when it comes to the International Olympic Committee, FIFA or an international federation. But there is merit in looking at this seriously and I hope the Minister will respond positively. The noble Baroness, Lady Jones, has done a service to the Committee by tabling these amendments, as have the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, and my noble friend. If we can attempt to find a framework to add to the Bill along the lines that they have suggested, the Bill will be significantly improved.

[Lord Mawson (CB)]

I was not going to speak on this, but I thought I might follow the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, because we both spent many years of our lives grappling with the London Olympics.

I first became involved in the London Olympics in 1999. The first meeting on day 1 was with someone called Richard Sumray, someone called Paul Brickell and myself. We met at the Bromley by Bow Centre over coffee and began to wonder, first, what would it be like to take on Paris in 2012 when it was the next city on the list? And where on earth was there enough land to do such a project?

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On the question from the noble Lord, Lord Parkinson, we have been consulting major events industry bodies, government departments, arm’s-length bodies and regional representatives to ensure that we reflect on the very wide range of issues impacting major events, including the important ones on environmental sustainability raised during this debate. We plan to deliver this strategy within the next 12 months. For all these reasons, I ask that the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, withdraws Amendment 59.

[Lord Mawson (CB)]

I thank the Minister for raising the point about us maybe sharing some of the knowledge we gained through the Olympics. I certainly would be really willing to do that, and I am sure the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, would as well. Some of us are concerned that, under successive Governments, lessons are not being learned from some of these projects. Some of us care a lot about the future of east London, and I worry that just a mile down the road, at the Royal Docks, we are not learning the lessons and are in danger of building the next phase of poverty in the East End of London, with developments literally with weeds between them. With the Olympic park, we were clear that we were building a mixed community that would connect housing, jobs and skills, health, and a whole range of enterprise and sport together in an integrated development.

I share with the Minister the thought that we need to get better at learning lessons. This Government rightly want to do some major regeneration programmes, which is correct, but I worry that the dots are not being joined here. I worry that if we do not do that then what we are seeing on the Royals will start to happen in lots of other communities across the country. I suspect that a conversation needs to happen—particularly with a new party leader, who may or may not know some of these things about place-making—about how there is an opportunity here that I fear will be missed unless we grab hold of it.

[Baroness Twycross (Lab)]

To confirm, I will set up a meeting with people who have been involved in setting up previous major events. I would not have said that I would without checking with colleagues in the department, so I will try to set that in motion as soon as possible. I thank the noble Lord very much for his offer.

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[Lord Hayward (Con)]

My Lords, I listened carefully to the comments from the noble Lord, Lord Addington, in relation to his amendments. My concern is about creep. I referred earlier to ensuring that we do not have creep that affects small businesses. Here I am concerned about setting up an organisation that has to be maintained when there is nothing relevant to do. The noble Lord used the phrase “always there”. I do not think that is the intention he is aiming for, but if you put it in the Bill you are saying to government, “You have to have a group of people who are working on this all the time”. It is surely far better for government to have the capacity to respond at the right time as quickly as possible, rather than having an “always there” structure.

Associated with that, on the accommodation to which the noble Lord refers, it is my understanding— I am looking at those who were involved in 2012 and in other major sporting events—that when it comes to the Olympics, UEFA and FIFA, the accommodation strategy is decided by those bodies. They will enter into negotiations with worldwide hotel chains and say, “What are you going to do if we come to Manchester, London or wherever it may happen to be?” This is not a responsibility of government. In fact, most of those international organisations would regard it as an intrusion if they were being told, “We’ve already got a strategy and this is how we operate”, because it may well conflict with what is intended by the major sporting organisations.

I cited international gay rugby tournaments when I spoke on Monday, and next year there is the gay EuroGames in Cardiff. With these smaller competitions, you go to those major cities and seek assistance on accommodation. Cardiff is expecting 5,000 or 6,000 competitors and a fair number of spectators next year. Any major authority will maintain a process by which it can deal with those sorts of approaches, but on a much smaller basis. I do not want to see this legislation set up a government structure that is required on an ongoing basis or a belief that the Government should intrude on matters such as accommodation when the major sporting organisations do it themselves because that is how they want to operate.

[Lord Mawson (CB)]

The noble Lord is correct on that point. It was the IOC that had the view on what should happen with the accommodation on the Olympic park. For example, it did not put kitchens in, for very good reasons—the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, will know more about this than I do. They wanted people eating not in that accommodation but in a special place, because if you are an Olympic athlete, eat the wrong foods and then have tests, there are implications. As a legacy company, we had the job afterwards of putting in the kitchens and a whole range of stuff to make all that work in its legacy format.

What you do want is close working relationships between that international body and those on the ground who are responsible for creating that legacy. The noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, may well agree that we learned on the go as we went on this journey together. It would be good if that kind of conversation about these close working relationships was happening between government and the international bodies on day one, so that we do not have to spend £323 million on a roof that does not quite work in legacy. Those connections really matter.

[Lord Hayward (Con)]

I thank the noble Lord for that helpful and affirmative intervention in relation to the points I am trying to make.

In broad terms, I do not want to see a structure that is required by government. One needs the capacity to respond quickly, in the right way, at the right time. That is how cities operate when they are trying to attract smaller international competitions of one form or another.

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[Lord Moynihan (Con)]

When it comes to further consideration of the importance of Amendment 76, to which my noble friend is speaking at the moment, the noble Lords, Lord Mawson and Lord Addington, may well agree that we possibly need to expand on this so that we have the opportunity, not just within six months but within a year, five years and 10 years, to see that there has been an appropriate sporting, social and economic legacy, and indeed a sustainability and environmental legacy. It is really important, because so many commitments are given at the time of hosting a major sporting event. Admirable as it is to have a review after six months, for legacy this is vital. By working together we can learn a lot of lessons that can benefit other host cities around the world for major sporting events. I put that to my noble friend. Does he agree that we can at least look at that before we come to Report?

[Lord Mawson (CB)]

It is a rich conversation, and it is really important that we learn this lesson. One of the things we did not achieve with the London 2012 Games—and it is no one’s fault—was to have someone caring about the legacy and really worrying away on day one when we won those Games.

When we first had that meeting in Bromley-by-Bow in 1999 to worry about all this, we were blue-sky thinking and thought, “How on earth do you make movement on a thing that’s going to be impossible? Paris is going to win—they’re the next one on the list and the IOC has decided already”. Fortunately, through a good friend of mine, Ian Hargreaves, at that time the deputy editor of the Financial Times, I was taken one Saturday morning to meet the architect Richard Rogers at his house in Royal Avenue. I had never met Richard before. We had a conversation to check whether we were mad in pushing this kind of idea. When I shared the thought, he was quiet for about 10 seconds, and I thought, “He thinks we are mad”. But Richard was actually a great risk-taker and had built some amazing things. He said that he thought building a mixed community was the right idea, and that he would like to join us, with his mate Mike Davies, who was just finishing the Millennium Dome at that point. At our second meeting, we began to worry about not only where the venues might go on those 248 hectares but the detail of, for example, the press and broadcast centre. None of us had ever done this before, and we had a conversation about how many journalists there would be; we thought maybe 100 or 200. Richard said he would go away and find out. He had an interesting idea of putting the press centre under the stadium, in a way that only Richard Rogers could have thought of. He came to the next meeting and I asked, “How many is it?” He said, “Andrew, it’s about 100,000”. The press and broadcast centre was a building bigger than Canary Wharf.

During the journey, because no one was at that point owning the legacy, into that building went a massive cable that all the press could use—fantastic value despite its cost—that was then going to be removed in legacy, along with that massive building, at the taxpayer’s expense. Unless a few us—including Gavin Poole who built the Here East development, now a fantastic innovation hub in the middle of the East End of London generating jobs, skills and university investments —had owned that issue of legacy, and the significance of that cable coming into that building, it would all have been lost. My thought to government is this: how do we ensure that on these big events some individual is owning those questions from day one? When Governments put millions of pounds into these things, they need to have longer legs than just six weeks.

[Lord Markham (Con)]

I thank both noble Lords for their interventions, and it shows the richness of this discussion. I agree with my noble friend Lord Moynihan on review timeframes that should be not just six months but longer terms. To the point on legacy from the noble Lord, Lord Mawson, I will add my own small contribution. I was chair of London and Continental Railways around 2019 and 2020. For those noble Lords who are not aware, that was the body responsible for all the regeneration around the Stratford area, as an arm of the Department for Transport. We were developing housing on from that accommodation, and it has been a very successful site for affordable housing. One of the legacies is that on the housing and regeneration front it was massively successful.

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[Lord Holmes of Richmond (Con)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow my noble friend Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay and to agree with everything that he said. I will build on his blank cheque, which was perfectly positioned phraseology. My Amendment 71 seeks to build on that in order to get the most from the moolah. If we are going to put financial assistance in place, as we do and will, it is only right and proper to make the most of that funding, to not restrict the funding and to not put issues around it that would make it less likely for us to win these major and mega sporting events. But we need to put in conditionality that will benefit the bid itself, the event and local communities and other organisations, not just at the event time but, if correctly put in place, for years and perhaps decades to come.

In no sense am I suggesting that the wording I have set out is exhaustive or covers all the issues at hand. I seek to demonstrate a sense of the threads of E, S and G running through this funding. It has to be right that local communities benefit directly from these events, because for mega events such as the Olympic Games and Paralympic Games, they put up with a lot: the bid process, the extensive build process, Games time and a significant deconstruct of all the overlay and temporary venues. They deserve, and must have, an upside during that process, at the event time and, indeed, post event. It is not just the sport that should benefit. The local community is hosting these events as well and must be included in the upside and benefits that come from that.

In my other proposed subsections, I quite rightly set out to put everything around pay gap reporting, minimum wage, procurement and supply chain in the Bill. There is so much positive impact that can be driven through the procurement and supply chain process. It is worth, at least at a principles-based level, having something in the Bill to send out the signals as to what kinds of events we want to stage in this nation: not to limit the bid, not to control and not to affect the flexibility that one needs when a governing body is bidding, but rather to enhance, sharpen and add to the bid, and to the Games and the championships experience, and to have a sense that the stadia, community, part of a city and part of our country can look forward, post Games and post event—not looking back at something that has happened in the past but taking things forward that would not have happened and would not be part of that local community were it not for the staging of that event or that Games.

It is right that we seek to get the maximum and think about what we want to say about the funding put into these events. Criteria and principles seem a perfectly acceptable way of doing this. I look forward to the Minister’s response.

[Lord Mawson (CB)]

My Lords, I support this amendment. But, when you have spent many years at the other end of the telescope of these large events and have responsibilities for building the kit, enabling it all to work and making sure that it integrates in those communities, the detail really matters. One of the things we managed to achieve with the London Olympics—which was in no small part to do with the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, Lord Coe and others—was to get cross-party support for this very big event, which we knew would probably go through different Governments and Mayors of London, and actually I think we achieved that. It was a very big and long event—and, by the way, we are still building out the Olympic Park today, so it was a big thing.

It is really important that, while there needs to be responsibility for large amounts of taxpayers’ money— I absolutely get that—if we are serious about these events, there also needs to be responsibility among our political parties to get cross-party agreement very early on.

That needs to happen not only at a national level. One or two of our colleagues in east London who were involved in the Labour councils there—I mention in particular my colleague Paul Brickell, who was a Labour councillor in Newham and ended up playing the lead role in regeneration as executive director—spent a lot of time building working relationships with the five Labour boroughs surrounding the Olympic Park, which when we began had a long history of being at war with each other. There was a lot of detailed work over cups of tea to build the relationships that support events such as this.

So, although I am in favour of being very careful about the money and get all of that, if we are serious about going for these events, there is a responsibility across our political parties to build working relationships early on and come to an agreement, so that those of us on the leading edge with day-to-day responsibility to make fast decisions tomorrow will not be held up by politics being played out on them somewhere else.

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, this is an interesting group of amendments that I assumed would not be needed. I assumed that we would have a series of debates about this. The noble Lord, Lord Parkinson, did a forensic job on the basic principles of where taxation comes from and how money is raised, going through. If the amendments are not needed, can the Minister tell us when she expects the interaction between the public system and Parliament on where the money comes from? That is a fairly reasonable question. If they have a structure behind what we are debating, we should know. I hope this is just a classic probing amendment, because that is what you should have at this point. We should know where we are going.

I take the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Mawson, that unless you get a commitment that everybody is prepared to buy into, there is no point doing anything, because it all needs a long-term plan. That is absolutely true, and if you start messing about with that, we just will not have any of these events, because no organising body in its right mind will come within a mile of us.

We have to have a degree of long-term planning. To get the benefits from events, we have to accept that even if Government A do something in a way that Government B do not particularly like when they come along, they will have to accept it and go along with it. Do not let your version of excellence be the enemy of the good on this.

I hope that, when the Minister responds, she will tell us exactly when these debates are to take place, what the structure will be going forward and what the spirit behind them is. The point is reasonable. I hope that there is an equally reasonable answer.

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[Lord Mawson (CB)]

My Lords, I was not involved in this aspect of the Games, but I was aware of the conversations going on about it at the time in east London. The Government might benefit from talking to Sir Robin Wales, the then Labour Mayor of Newham, who was deeply concerned about all this, and Tessa Sanderson, who tried to engage with this area. I suggest that the problem is seeing projects such as this as being about structures rather than people. If you really want this stuff to happen, you have to get interested in the Tessas and others of this world, on the ground, who want to do something about it, and back them. If my memory serves me correctly, they felt very unsupported and doubted whether the various large structures around them would do anything consistent long term. There are lessons to be learned here. Maybe if we have a conversation with some of these people, we can learn some of those lessons.

[Baroness Dacres of Lewisham (Lab)]

My Lords, I want to add to this briefly. I have been sitting and listening to what has been said, and the one thing I have not heard about is working and liaising with local government. At the end of the day, it is at the forefront of providing the facilities noble Lords are talking about. Over the years, underfunding has meant that swimming pools have been closed and other sports events have not been able to function. There needs to be recognition that we in this Committee and those higher up can say what we would like to see, but we have to work with local government because it has the routes into the community and the grass-roots organisations. Those volunteers—the parents noble Lords are talking about—have the reach and their first port of call is local government.

I just wanted to add that to the debate so we can bear that in mind. We cannot do this in isolation. We must involve local government.

Volunteering

Lord Mawson Excerpts

Wednesday 21st February 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Mawson (CB)]

My Lords, the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park volunteering programme, Park Champions, started as a result of wanting to harness the spirit and energy demonstrated by the Games makers during 2012. I must declare an interest as a director of the London Legacy Development Corporation and as the chairman of its regeneration and communities committee.

We have used this programme, which has involved many hundreds of local people and impacted on thousands of lives, to build long-term relationships between local people and the new park and place. We have understood that volunteering is a good route, but by no means the only one, to help improve personal well-being and community resilience. We have used volunteering as a pathway towards increased skills and employability. We have focused on first-time volunteers and on ensuring that we offer a fully inclusive volunteer programme, which has low barriers to entry, as well as proactively supporting those with physical disabilities, mental health problems and learning difficulties.

We have purposefully grown a strong network of local volunteers who embody the pride and positivity they feel for their park and this part of London. One hundred and twenty-four of our Park Champions have gained accredited training through their volunteering roles; a further 33 have benefited from employment support and another 36 have gone on to secure employment as a direct result of their volunteering roles and experience. The lessons learned are: first, the value of co-production and of designing the programme with volunteers as much as possible; secondly, the benefit of offering a range of pick-and-mix volunteer opportunities; and, thirdly, the power of “thank you” and a recognition of the importance of relationships. Our Park Champions have become a huge additional team on the park who both care about the place and welcome others. Successful volunteer programmes are all about people and relationships, and a sense of purpose.

Come and spend a day on the Olympic park this spring and see what we have been getting up to in east London since 2012. Your Lordships will see an entrepreneurial response to the issues of Olympic legacy—the most successful legacy in the history of the Games—and I suggest that our approach to volunteers is a clue to this success. There may also be helpful clues here regarding the actions of the public, business and voluntary sectors, and for government, in the actions we all need to take going forward.