Baroness Ford
Main Page: Baroness Ford (Crossbench - Life peer)
Baroness Ford
My Lords, I thought, when the Minister opened the debate and was talking about the great events of this summer, that she might have mentioned that Chelsea had won the Champions League on Saturday night. This Peer certainly had a very happy husband—icing on the cake of a great sporting summer.
More seriously, this is the last time we will debate the London 2012 Olympic Games in your Lordships’ House before the opening ceremony on 27 July. As we know, many Members of your Lordships’ House have played important roles in securing, planning and delivering the platform for the Games. In the next few weeks, those roles will extend to staging the Games and to delivering Team GB’s performance. We all hope for a fantastic Games and a once-in-a-lifetime experience for so many people across the UK who will be participating in many different ways in this phenomenal event.
For many people, that will be the culmination of their Olympic experience, the end of a great adventure, but for an important group of people it is only the end of the beginning. Those are the people who will carry on, assuring the legacy of the London Olympics. It will be no surprise to your Lordships that it is the legacy that I wish to dwell on this afternoon, and in particular the legacy promised to the people of east London. It is a legacy of homes, jobs, aspirations and improved life chances, for all these things were embodied in the promise made in Singapore in 2005, when the UK bravely asserted that these Games would become completely embedded in the regeneration of east London. That incredibly bold and ambitious claim had never been attempted before.
Seven years later, what progress has been made? No other Olympic city has ever taken on the level of transformation that has occurred in east London. Stratford now arguably has the best connected public transport in London. As the Minister mentioned, the £1.5 billion investment made by Westfield is complete and trading way beyond its wildest expectations. It is a phenomenal success. The 500-acre Olympic park has been utterly transformed from the industrial wasteland that characterised that site, which I knew from way back, long before the bid. I did not even know that there was water on that site; now there are 7.5 kilometres of beautifully reclaimed waterways. The site is a beautiful new park—a royal park, of course, to be named in this great Jubilee year as the Queen Elizabeth Olympic park. That phenomenally well designed green space and those reclaimed waterways and reinstated natural habitats all frame some of the best sporting venues that the world has to offer. In due course, beginning this autumn, they will be surrounded by some of the best family housing that London has to offer. It is quite a phenomenal achievement and has never been done before.
The IOC president, Jacques Rogge—not always an easy man to please, as the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, would testify—confirmed London’s achievement at the last IOC session when he said:
“London has raised the bar on how to deliver a lasting legacy. We can already see tangible results in the … regeneration of East London. This great historical city has created a legacy blueprint for future Games hosts”.
Praise indeed, and none of this has occurred by accident. London learnt the lessons of other host cities that left the thinking about legacy until after the Games. Generally, that was much too late, so in 2009 the Government and the Mayor of London set up their legacy organisation, which I have had the most enormous privilege to chair from its inception. Our role was simply to focus on delivering on the promises made in respect of the Olympic park. As the noble Lords, Lord Higgins and Lord Addington, have mentioned, there is a much wider legacy—a sporting and participation legacy—but our brief was the legacy from the park.
Those promises were in two parts. First, we had to deal with securing viable futures for the permanent venues designed for the Games, which is not always an easy task. It has been very important that these venues, which in other countries have often had very mixed fortunes after the Games, were viable in a way that made them commercially successful. I do not imagine that the taxpayer would have appreciated having to subsidise these venues after the Games when so much public money had been already spent on them, so securing commercially viable futures, as we have been able to do with six out of the eight venues, has been a great success. Yet this would not be a success if, in so doing, we had priced local people out of these venues.
Here I pay tribute to the noble Baroness, Lady Doocey, whose committee at the London Assembly really challenged and encouraged us. It was especially important to us to secure a pricing structure that pegged entry and participation at these venues to the local market. In other words, the cost of a swim in the Olympic aquatics centre is pegged at the same price as at the surrounding local authority pools, so there is no question that access to these venues will somehow be for visitors or elite groups. They are absolutely affordable for local kids and local families.
The Olympic village, likewise—now completely presold, unbelievably, in the current banking and property market—will have a high proportion of affordable homes, delivering the promise made on housing in 2005. Pulling off this balance has often been challenging but frankly hugely important for the credibility of the promise to local people. Of the 7,500 jobs already created at Westfield, the vast majority have gone to local people, demonstrating again, as the Minister mentioned, that the legacy is bearing fruit even before the Games begin. That was the first part of our job.
It will take longer to know whether the second part of our job—the legacy—has worked because the real success of the Games will not be fully clear for some years to come. That is because it will take some time to see the investment in Stratford fully bear fruit in the wider regeneration of that part of east London. To track progress in a methodical and highly visible way, the Olympic host boroughs and the Mayor of London have adopted the simple concept of convergence: the idea that, if the Games achieve what they set out to do, over a 20-year period all the social indicators that currently lag the rest of London will improve to converge with the London average. Targets such as educational attainment, public health outcomes, employment and income levels have been set to measure progress over that period. Watching Stratford visibly improve, as I have every week for four years, suggests to me that things are on the march, and I have enormous faith that change will happen in the way that we all hope.
An interesting point is that when London was beset by the appalling riots last summer, it was noticeable that one of the few boroughs that experienced virtually no trouble was Newham. I am sure that people in Newham have real pride in and appreciation of the work and investment that has gone into the area, and I do not believe that it was a coincidence that this borough, one of the poorest in London and the most ethnically diverse, did not get caught up in the madness that afflicted other parts of the capital last year. That is a point worth reflecting on.
In this last debate, we should pay sincere tribute, as others, particularly the noble Lord, Lord Haskel, have done, to the work of Sir David Higgins and his successor Dennis Hone and their teams at the ODA. The completion of the park ahead of time and under budget has been the most incredible achievement, as others have said, and a great testimony to the UK construction industry. All professions, especially the chartered surveyors, of which I am an honorary member, have played their part in making this project a world-class success. I am particularly proud that so many of my former colleagues at English Partnerships formed the backbone of the ODA team, bringing all the skills they developed over a number of years on large, complex sites across England. We really understand how to do this kind of transformation in England, and the remediation and regeneration of this site are now regarded as a genuinely world-class exemplar.
My finishing line has hoved into view a little earlier than I had expected. I had planned to step down after the Games as this phase of the legacy finishes and a new phase of construction begins. The park will close for one year to allow significant construction works to take place to remove the Olympic overlay, to build the network of bridges, new roads and pathways in the park, to complete the landscaping of the parkland and to resize the venues for legacy use. This is a sizeable construction project in its own right and will take a year to complete before the north part of the park reopens exactly one year after the Games on 27 July 2013. The south part of the park, with the more complicated reconfiguration of the stadium and the aquatics centre, will open quite quickly thereafter at Easter 2014. I let the Mayor of London know last year that I felt that this phase should be overseen by a new chairman who would be able to devote significant time to this still-considerable task. After the election, the mayor immediately appointed my successor, so I shall hand over after my board meeting tomorrow.
The stadium and the broadcast centre remain to be finalised. As the noble Lord, Lord Higgins, hinted, it was always intended that the stadium would be the new home of UK athletics, the new Crystal Palace. Its future has been cemented by the UK winning the right to host the 2017 world athletics championships. That is a phenomenal legacy from a sporting point of view. My desire from the start was always to see whether there were compatible uses, which the noble Lord, Lord Higgins, hinted at, that could sit alongside athletics to bring life and revenue to the stadium all year round. In the past week, that commercial process has been extended by some eight weeks, but it will come to a close in a couple of months and I look forward to welcoming its very successful outcome.
It has been a pleasure and a privilege to be a part of this great project and to be part of assuring the legacy and of delivering one of the most ambitious promises that any Government and city have ever made. I have had the pleasure of working with an outstanding team of people at the Olympic Park Legacy Company and of working with two amazing Ministers: Hugh Robertson, the Olympics Minister, and, of course, the incomparable force of nature that is the right honourable Tessa Jowell, who everyone on all sides of the House understands has done more than anyone in government over 10 years to ensure that these Games are a truly outstanding success.
As the Games finish, the legacy work continues apace, and we must not forget the promises made to the communities in east London. I know that the host boroughs will keep up that pressure, and I look forward to watching the London Legacy Development Corporation get on and finish the job.