Unrevised transcript of evidence taken before The Select Committee on Olympic and Paralympic Legacy Inquiry on OLYMPIC AND PARALYMPIC LEGACY Evidence Session No. 7 Heard in Public Questions 109 - 119 THURSDAY 27 JUNE 2013 10 am Witness: David Luckes USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT 1. This is an uncorrected transcript of evidence taken in public and webcast on www.parliamentlive.tv. 2. Any public use of, or reference to, the contents should make clear that neither Members nor witnesses have had the opportunity to correct the record. If in doubt as to the propriety of using the transcript, please contact the Clerk of the Committee. 3. Members and witnesses are asked to send corrections to the Clerk of the Committee within 7 days of receipt. 1 Members present Lord Harris of Haringey (Chairman) Earl of Arran Baroness Billingham Baroness King of Bow Lord Moynihan Lord Stoneham of Droxford Baroness Wheatcroft Lord Wigley ________________ Witness David Luckes, author of the original London 2012 Games feasibility study and former Head of Sport Competition at LOCOG Q109 The Chairman: Good morning and thank you very much for joining us. We are expecting at least one other member of the Committee to join us, but they will crash in at some point just as you are considering an answer. This is a public session and an uncorrected transcript of it will be given to you with an opportunity to make any corrections of fact. In the mean time, however, we will put the uncorrected transcript on to the website, so this is an incentive for you to make any corrections as quickly as possible. We are being webcast as well today, for those people who are following us in that degree of detail. We know that you were very involved in the preparation of the bid right from the outset. Perhaps you would just sketch through fairly briefly what you see as being the origins of the London 2012 bid; why previous UK bids to host the Olympic Games were unsuccessful and, therefore, how the 2012 bid was different; and at what point in the process you felt that the bid became credible. David Luckes: When I was approached by Craig Reedie, who was then chair of the British Olympic Association, in February 1997, I was a competing athlete in hockey, so I was playing. 2 I was a member of the BOA’s Athletes’ Commission and because this was pre-Lottery funding, I was looking for employment or looking for something certainly to do to fill up the CV. So Craig phoned me and asked if I was prepared to do a three-month analysis free of charge for the BOA, looking at the bidding cities for 2004. This was on the basis of previous bids from Birmingham for 1992, and Manchester for 1996 and 2000. Craig explained that the National Olympic Committee, which comprises members of all the sports represented in the BOA, had decided that the next bid would come from London for a number of reasons, not least because of the feedback from the people who were the key constituents—namely, the IOC members—that they wanted to see a London bid. The world had moved on a little bit from the late 1980s when Birmingham was bidding, when you had Belgrade, Brisbane, Amsterdam, Paris—a number of good cities—and there was a feeling that the Olympic movement, having gone through Barcelona, Atlanta and Sydney, now was a property that a lot of people wanted to see go to more major cities and cities with the infrastructure that could deliver an event of that size. So I was asked to do that initial three-month feasibility study, then asked to remain for another three months and then kept on full-time, albeit doing a number of other roles within the British Olympic Association. The Chairman: Are you able to tell us at what point you thought the bid moved from being a pipedream to one that was becoming credible? David Luckes: If truth be told, between 1997 and 2000 it was difficult to see how London could mount a viable bid when you did not have a unified local authority structure. It was only when the Greater London Authority and the Mayor’s Office were established that there was a single point of reference and a single point of contact for people looking to put forward a coherent bid against other world-renowned cities. So until 2000 I do not think it was a bid that had any particular legs, but then that was not the process of the evaluation. It was really to look at what it was required to do and look at how other cities were 3 approaching it. Back in 1997 when I was first brought on, they had not even determined the 2004 Olympic Games city; that was determined in September 1997 and went to Athens. On that basis, it was felt that the 2008 Games would not come back to Europe, so it gave a little bit of leeway and people were not even beginning to talk about anything until 2012. Following the establishment of the Greater London Authority and the introduction of the Mayor, things became easier because you did have that single reference point, but there was still a concern on two fronts: the lack of venues and facilities in the capital, especially indoor facilities capable of staging the number of indoor sports—14—that you have to put on for the Olympic Games. But through that process the Dome and, more importantly, ExCeL, the first phase, came on stream, which back in 1997/1998 were only in the planning phases. So there was more basic infrastructure that gave an element of credibility to a potential bid. There was still the concern that you needed to make the bid as compact as possible in order to give you the best chance of winning it in a competitive environment, and that is why there was the development of an East London option and a West London option tied to the travel distances and travel times. When the bid was then formulated and set up in June 2003, there was a view that we still needed to do more work in terms of the use of existing, temporary and, in what probably now is a very overused phrase, “iconic locations” to give that mix. So I think it became viable through that process. I think when it became credible was probably following the Evaluation Commission visit in 2005, when we moved from being a probably clear third place city, following the report in 2004, to a city that had a vision and a concept that was technically viable but also technically attractive to the international federations and the people we spoke to within the International Olympic Committee. The Chairman: So really in the last six months. 4 David Luckes: I would say that the momentum shifted following that Evaluation Commission visit and the report that came out following that, yes. Q110 Lord Moynihan: Can we just back up to your consideration of the two options that you just mentioned—namely, the West London Games and the East London option? Could you advise the Committee why the East London option was eventually chosen as the preferred location for the bid? Do you think there could have been a West London bid? In your initial work, did you feel that there was sufficient merit in taking the West London bid forward, and what was the determining factor that led to the consideration going to East London? David Luckes: Casting the mind back to the late 1990s—and I was thinking about this last night and had to go back and have a look at some old diaries to work out the chronology of many of these issues—initially it was going to be a West London-based bid. That was purely around the fact that, at that time, Wembley Stadium was being developed as a national stadium for athletics, rugby league and football, which all had equal status and equal standing within that process. So we would have had an 80,000-seat stadium with an athletics track, and I believe it was written into the brief for that that, should there be an Olympic bid from London, Wembley would be the centre point, so we worked on that basis initially. As the discussions over the athletics track went on and the permanent provision of an athletics facility within Wembley faded away somewhat and certain other solutions, such as a platform solution for the 2005 World Championships in Athletics, were mooted, there was a discussion over whether you should take the money that you would put into a very costly platform solution and build a new stadium for the World Championships in Athletics at Picketts Lock. That then split very much the focus of what I was looking at, which was the feasibility, because Wembley suddenly was not as viable. Also, if then there was a stadium to be built either at Picketts Lock or, potentially, somewhere in East London, that changed the 5 dynamic and changed the environment for us from that compact Games—because in the East we had ExCeL and the Millennium Dome—to big facilities and also big areas of land that we felt we could use. We did a lot of work with the London Planning Advisory Council, which was the forerunner for what then moved into the Greater London Authority. They did an assessment of 51 sites around both East and West London, and the determining criterion for that was proximity to either a stadium in Stratford or a stadium in Wembley.