London's Expensive Olympics 2012

Hands up all of you UK taxpayers who were not suprised today when Tessa Jowell announced that the estimated cost of hosting the London 2012 Olympics has just increased by 40%, in one year.

Thats all of you then.

Let me fill in some background to those from outside of the UK.

Our government is fucking useless at project management, A1, 24 carat fucking useless at organising anything that involves a budget and public spending.

Example : Back in the mid 1990's the conservative government decided that the UK should greet the oncoming millenium with a huge year long celebration of Britishness and to that end they commissioned the building of a big tent in Greenwich, London - The Millenium Dome.

It was estiimated that the big tent and the stuff that went inside it (they didn't know at that point what to actually put inside it) would cost £399 million and would attract 12 million visitors in the year that it would be open.

At the end of the year 2000 it was revealed that it had in fact only attracted 6 million visitors and that the total cost of the project was £789 million, of which £603 million was pick-pocketed out of the National Lottery Fund, the fund that was created to raise money "for good causes".

Example : Wembley Stadium (London again), closed to a huge sigh of relief from those of us who had ever been there, in October 2000 for redevelopment, with a plan for demolition before the end of 2000 and the new Wembley Stadium to be completed sometime in 2003, however at that point Tony Blairs labour government were still bickering about what should be included in the "new national stadium" and all sorts of weird and wonderful suggestions were bounded about with an elevated athletics running track suggested to get around the fact that the seating for the football and rugby events needed to be too close to the pitch for such a track to be included.

After it seemed like every single member of parliament had stuck his or her oar and spanner into the works the contract was finally started in 2003 at an estimated cost of £757 million with a scheduled opening date of 13th May 2006.

Its still not finished.

Luckily the main contractor had signed a fixed price contract which is probably the only sensible thing that the government insisted upon during the whole design phase, otherwise we could easily be paying over £1billion for our national stadium by now - it is however well worth noting that the Welsh National Sports Stadium in Cardiff, 74500 seats and a sliding roof, only cost £126 million in 1999.

Example : The Leeds Supertram Scheme, I can't even bring myself to recount this tale again, its here if you want to read some of it suffice to say that our national government led our local council a merry dance for ten years and made them spend £40 million of our local rates money on a project that they never intended to fund, nett result, nothing, zippo, fookall to show for our £40 million, sorry, one altered road junction and, erm, thats all.


So back in July of 2005 when London celebrated the winning of the bid for the 2012 olympics the first question on everyones lips was "who pays for it ?" and the second question was "who project manages it ?" and after hearing the answer "the government will" the third question was "you're fooking joking aren't you, have you forgotten the dome already ?"

The original estimate to build the olympic village, all of its stadia, and to host the event was put at £2.4billion, thats just £2,400,000,000 then, plus a bit more for extra security and a bit more on top for clearing up some of the sites after the olympics and converting the accomodation into social housing schemes.

We all gasped at the sums involved and then laughed when government ministers promised that the 2005 budget was "robust" and "viable" and we all shouted "remember the dome" and "look at wembley" and in Leeds we all shouted "where the fook is our supertram" and none of us believed them.

Sure enough, today Tessa Jowell, Minister for Culture asked parliament to stump up an extra £900million, thats a 40% increase in just 15 months with not much evidence of any work actually having started on the project yet, and I laughed very loud when driving my car today as I heard on the radio one of our local MP's ask Tessa Jowell why she thought it necessary to spend an additional £400 million on a firm of consultants who were being employed to make sure that the budget didn't increase any further, presumably they'll start consulting after their £400million has been banked ?

The good news is that most of the extra £900,000,000 will come from London taxpayers - serves the bas'tads right for nicking all of the blue riband events for themselves every time - but once again HM Government will be dipping into the "good causes" lottery fund, you know, the fund thats there for worthy causes like charities and government overspending and such like.

One of the crazy accounting anomolies is that HM Government are now having to pay VAT (a sort of sales tax) on the new buildings, which they apparently didn't think they'd have to do - well slap my buttocks and call me Daisy but I'd hazard a guess that VAT would be chargeable and I ain't nobody's treasury minister - so we taxpayers will pay the VAT out of our lottery fund which will go back to, yes, the government, who will spend it on, yes, anyone, more weapons for our troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, correct at the back, creative accounting at its best.

And despite Tessa Jowells assurances that she doesn't expect the budget to rise much further, she readily admits that she still has not yet costed the security measures and the post-olympic costs into the budget and some soothsayers are predicted a final cost of between £5billion and £8billion, thats £8000,000,000 - it looks better with the zeros on the end.

When you doubt politicians its not being cynical, its being realistic, this one will run and run, we've six more years of new budgets to come yet.