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Olympic Games 2012

My Lords, I declare my interest as recorded, particularly my membership of the advisory board of the British Olympic Association. I strongly support everything that my noble friends Lord Coe and Lord Moynihan have just said. I have two sets of necessarily hard-edged points and questions for the Government to answer, on the growth of government bureaucracy in relation to the Olympic programme in the run-up to 2012 and on security at the Olympics. First, there is too much Olympic bureaucracy—I am referring to government bureaucracy here. It is growing too fast, it is too costly and the money that is being spent on it should be spent on athletes, not on office workers, or should not be spent at all but saved, in our present economic circumstances. Among all the LOCOGs, ODAs and BOAs—the bodies that necessarily and excellently populate this stage of Olympic preparations—there is another, much less well known body: the GOE. What is this? I stumbled upon this hitherto secretive body, which the Government never announced publicly in any blaze of publicity. It is the Government Olympic Executive. Anxious to learn about this, I asked a series of Parliamentary Questions on its role and staffing that were answered, in his characteristically assiduous way, by the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Oldham. He kindly told me in a Written Answer on 20 May that the Government Olympic Executive had precisely 91.9 full-time equivalents working for it, reporting to the Permanent Secretary at the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. It was broken down into various teams, he told me, in charge of build and finance, staging, legacy, operations and communications—all this at a cost in 2008-09 of £7 million. I suspect that, since then, that has grown substantially. In another Answer on 19 May, the same Minister kindly stated that, ""the GOE requires oversight of the entire 2012 programme".—[Official Report, 19/5/09; col. WA 304.]" I am a bit concerned about the use of the word "requires" there and the civil servants who drafted it; I wish that we had the noble Lord, Lord Quirk, that great grammarian, in the Chamber to look at that use of the word. That, however, is the word that was used. The GOE has oversight, so the Government say. It is therefore responsible if anything goes wrong. So I sat back and thought, "Well, those are the answers. I now know what the situation is". Subsequently, though, I found out that at exactly the same time that those answers were being considered and composed by the civil servants, a substantial Olympic presentation was given by officials from the self-same Government Olympic Executive to the interested Olympic parties in London on 13 May 2009, where they were told that the number of staff involved was not the 91.9 of the Government Executive but, rather, that there were—wait for it, my Lords—782 "focused staff", to use the language of the presentation, in government departments and non-departmental public bodies concerned with the Olympics. Of those, a staggering 81 are working in communications. What on earth can the cost of all this be? On the matter of cost—this is a restricted debate so I do not have time to go into this in greater detail—I have learnt that, for example, five civil servants from the Government Olympic Executive are going to be sent to Vancouver for the Winter Games. It is reasonable to ask why. How much should this cost? Is the Minister aware that our skiers face major financial constraints in preparations for going, and that Winter Games are about athletes, not visiting civil servants? After all, I do not think we are going to see much snow in London in 2012. If I were the Permanent Secretary at the DCMS, I would be a bit nervous of the heavy boots of the Public Accounts Committee in the other place approaching my door, wanting to look at expenditure on this sort of thing. A future Conservative Government, if elected, will need to get to grips with this staggering bureaucracy and misapplication of resources. I turn to security. I hear continuing murmurs from those concerned that there is still a lack of proper security co-ordination, which must be sorted out soon. Who, under the Home Secretary of the day—or perhaps these days I should say "the Home Secretary of the week"—is the named official or police officer with ultimate overall responsibility for the co-ordination of Olympic security? Is there such a person? If not, why not? The Minister owes us an answer to that question. Do the Government yet have what is known in the trade as a CONOPS—or, to deconstruct that ugly abbreviation, an integrated concept of operations—that is fully worked up with regard to Olympic security? It has been suggested that one does not yet exist. When will a statement be made, which has long been promised, about the introduction of such an integrated plan—setting aside, of course, those things that must necessarily be kept secret? We need urgent reassurance from the Government on stopping the growth of bureaucracy and expenditure, and on promoting a proper security plan.