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One London Welcomes PAC Olympic Report

The One London party has called for no further spending to be committed to the 2012 London Olympics following publication of a House of Commons Public Accounts Committee report into expenditure on the 2012 Olympics.

The report finds that “Whilst the cost estimates have increased by £5.3 billion, the public funding required to meet these costs has increased by £5.9 billion due to significantly lower expectations for private sector funding.”

Damian Hockney, leader of the One London Party said: “When we predicted in 2005 that the Olympics would cost London £10 billion, the main parties dismissed us. Now that they have caught up, and the government is clinging to its revised figure of £9.3 billion, we can only re-iterate that this Olympic bid was a huge fraud perpetrated on taxpayers by the government and the Mayor of London.”

The report also states that “Despite the £5.9 billion increase in the public funding for the Games, the Department [or Culture, Media and Sport] has not specified what will be delivered in return for this expenditure and the current budget cannot be reconciled to the commitments in the original bid”

Hockney also welcomed the publication of the New Economic Foundation report which claims that the Olympics will fail to benefit the poorest people in East London. “This confirms what the One London Party has been saying at the London Assembly for four years,” he adds.

“We are constantly told that there will be massive benefits arising from the 2012 Games, but when we try to find out what they will be, nobody seems to know. No recent host city – whether Athens or Sydney or Barcelona - has experienced a drop in unemployment as a result of hosting the Games.

“All we do know for certain is that thousands of jobs have been lost in the area through closures caused by the demolition of existing business premises on the Olympic site, some of which cannot relocate. And that the imposition of EU rules on procurement have an impact on how many local people will be able to find work on the Olympics even during the construction process itself.”