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Olympic Legacy

My party is in favour of exactly what the Select Committee says: that, wherever possible, we should ensure that there is a permanent legacy. The current plans for shooting do not allow any legacy to be created, and we think it highly regrettable that more research was not done into making possible some kind of legacy for shooting from the Olympics. May I ask the Secretary of State about design? When venues are being built, it is important that the potential legacy tenants—the people who will use the venues after the Olympics have finished—have some input into the design. Can he explain why design decisions have been taken before legacy tenants have been confirmed? That makes legacy use more expensive and less attractive to potential tenants. I compare that to what happened during the 2002 Commonwealth games in Manchester, when Manchester city was confirmed as a legacy tenant right from the outset, which meant that there could be a smooth transition and that a legacy could be assured. This June, the Government finally published their legacy action plan—three years after winning the bid and following two warnings from the Select Committee that they needed to get a move on. If the plan had been even barely adequate, however, we would not be having this debate. However, the fact is that it contains simply a series of re-announcements and only one new idea. The Government re-announced the promise of five hours of sport per week. That is fine as an aspiration, but when unpicked it works out at £15 per school per week to increase the amount of sport from two to five hours a week for every pupil. They also re-announced the target of making 2 million people more active, which dates from March 2007, as well as the medals target, which dates back to the 2006 Budget. They also re-announced decisions in a Department for Transport plan to boost cycling and a Department of Health plan to encourage healthy eating by babies. We should not plan the 2012 legacy by cobbling together every single programme with vague links to sport and the Olympics. This is not about looking at what we are already doing, but about what we could do. One new idea has been proposed: free swimming for under-16s and over-60s. Of course we welcome anything that encourages swimming, especially because it comes top of the list of sports that people say they would be interested in taking up. However, local councils say that not nearly enough money has been put aside to finance the plan. I would like to mention a matter that I brought to the Secretary of State's attention during the last Culture, Media and Sport questions. He received a letter from the Labour leader of Stevenage council—in the Minister of State's constituency—telling him that the average cost for a district council of implementing the scheme for the over-60s alone would represent a 2 per cent. increase in council tax. Is this really the time—when families up and down the country are struggling—for the Department to fund its schemes by bludgeoning its councils into back-door rises in council tax?