I have a free gift for the prime minister in his hour of torment. It will
smack his battered administration with a sense of command. It will send his
popularity soaring and save £50 billion of public money. He would also be
doing the right thing.
Gordon Brown should announce forthwith that he is putting his three wildest
white elephants out to grass: identity cards, the National Health Service
computer and the plan to locate the 2012 Olympics in Stratford. All have
budgets out of control. Such is this centralist squandermongering that Brown
could take 2p off income tax for a decade or give every school, hospital and
library in Britain a Christmas bonus of £1m.
The first two projects could vanish with no shock to the system but the
impoverishment of a few consultants. The ID computer is seriously sick. A
review last year led to a supposed scaling back from some £10 billion to
£5.4 billion. The £10 billion was reckoned by outsiders to be a gross
underestimate and the new figure has been rising by 5% each six months. A
figure of £20 billion remains plausible.
As for the theory that the, as yet unworkable, ID computer will “help catch
criminals”, most computer commentators say: tell that to the marines.
Criminals will revel in it. Every month we have evidence that such giant
systems are porous both to hacking and to human error. British people will
not accept being interrogated by the state so that their personal details
can be available to every agency in Europe and every hacker in the world.
The NHS computer is, if anything, sicker. Nobody can now recall a reason for
it. Lord Warner recently admitted that its cost had risen to £20 billion.
Choose-and-book, already in place, is simply not required by general
practice. The government is weakening in its demand that patients must opt
out of, rather than opt into, making their medical records open to the
world. But if they must opt in, who will bother? In the latest survey, 85%
of doctors want “an inquiry” into whether the project should proceed.
The Olympics is a different can of worms. Brown is reputed to have hated the
project from the start but lacked the guts to stop the bid or protest at
Tessa Jowell’s clearly fraudulent bid price. It would be within Britain’s
rights to accept the 2012 Olympics, but on its original terms, not those of
an extravagance-obsessed International Olympic Committee (IOC). The terms
should be those of the original, much vaunted “low-cost Games”, an already
lofty £2.4 billion.
Anyone who cannot stage a two-week sporting festival in a well-equipped
capital city for that amount of money should not go near a whelk stall. He
should certainly not sit, like the Olympic Delivery Authority (ODA), atop
700 staff and £400m in “delivery expenses” and be allowed to go junketing to
Ascot, Twickenham and Claridge’s, as consultancies vie for “cost-plus”
contracts.
Because the ODA is in the pocket of the obscure and unaccountable IOC, the two
are in effect conspiring to rob British taxpayers of colossal sums of money.
Little or none of the current £9 billion budget reflects sporting necessity.
As for legacy, this is no longer described by the ODA as an investment but
as a cost. More than £1 billion is going into regenerating a tiny corner of
east London that would surely regenerate itself with a decontamination
grant.
From the moment Britain won the Games in 2005 the money began to go wrong. It
was revealed that the bid budget did not include inflation, security, Vat or
something called a “delivery fee”. When the Treasury insisted last year on a
£2.7 billion contingency, the ODA howled that this was ridiculously high.
Two weeks ago Jonathan Stephens, the sports department’s permanent
secretary, admitted that it would probably be spent.
London sold itself to the IOC as offering a low-cost “people’s Games”. It now
seems likely to cost more than any sporting event since Nero. Only a
dictatorship, China, has managed to extract more from its citizens (roughly
£15 billion) and it is getting big infrastructure for its money.
Sir Stuart Lipton, the developer, when asked last summer to chair the ODA,
took one look at its budget and walked away, saying that it could not be
delivered for less than £15-£16 billion.
The Olympic stadium will probably be full only for the opening and closing
ceremonies, yet it has doubled in cost to £500m and received howls of
“dumbing down” from the architectural press. On its proclaimed
sustainability, Building Design commented pithily: “There is nothing
sustainable about building an 80,000-seat stadium for less than two months’
use.” The 55,000 of these seats to be demolished after two weeks must be the
most expensive folding chairs in the world.
Nor is there any obvious after-use for a stadium that is shaped exclusively
for athletics and too big for other team sports. The athletics stadium at
Crystal Palace is never bursting at the seams. Besides, London has just
built a brand new stadium at Wembley, designed by Lord Foster to be
converted to track and field if need be.
Meanwhile, no builder would take on Zaha Hadid’s wildly visionary aquatic
centre at the budget price. The price was doubled to £150m and the capacity
reduced from 20,000 seats to 2,500. Both stadium and pool have attracted
only one contractor, leaving the ODA vulnerable to further inflation.
There is no conceivable value-for-money in a £130m “media centre” of a
gigantic 1.29m sq ft, the size of the tallest Canary Wharf tower lain on its
side. The £2 billion Olympic village is so designed that it will have to be
expensively converted for saleable housing. In Barcelona I was told that it
would have been cheaper to demolish it and start again. Two large student
halls of residence on the site were last month smashed to the ground in a
wild gesture of extravagance.
While the public must visit Stratford by train, the ODA is planning
Soviet-style Zil lanes up the Mile End Road for limousines of the IOC’s
“Olympic family”. It is as if London was giving itself over to the mafia for
a fortnight.
This project, however worthy in intention, is beyond the realm of crazy. It
promises nothing but a litany of hell for ministers from now until 2012. The
government is already seeking statutory powers to double the lottery’s
contribution by another £1 billion. The House of Lords may well vote against
any such raid on other good causes.
The arts lobby is turning against the Games as its capital project funding is
cut, from £80m last year to £20m next. Sport England has lost some £400m to
go to the Olympics. London alone has been deprived of nine swimming pools
and other sports centres.
To save money James Purnell, the sports secretary, blandly declares that
walking, bicycling, dancing and gymnastics are no longer sports. He has
cunningly shifted responsibility for meeting the Olympic target of “2m more
Britons in active sport by 2012” to the health department. Last week Derek
Mapp, chairman of Sport England, was sacked for protesting at this decision.
Purnell has somehow to find an extra £600m for Olympics training, or sports
economists have bizarrely predicted that Britain will not make the target of
fourth place on the medals table.
It is no wonder that Edward Leigh, the Commons public accounts committee
chairman, two weeks ago told the ODA that he had “no confidence in your
ability to plan ahead”. He was “staggered” by its accounting. Don Touhig,
the Labour MP, called it “the most catastrophic piece of financial
mismanagement in the history of the world” – a title for which competition
is fierce.
This is the last realistic moment when Brown can gain popularity, money and
glory by intervening in this nonsense. He can tell the ODA to sack its
grotesque apparat of consultants, officials and deliverers and forget
“legacy”, which no Olympic Games has ever delivered. The proposed
“concentration camp” at Stratford should be abandoned and events dispersed
across the southeast.
There is still time. There are many ways of staging exciting Olympics in
London in 2012. If they do not suit the fat cats of the IOC, too bad. They
were sold a £2.4 billion Games and that is what they should get. Not a penny
more.
This project is becoming a grotesque monument to the incompetence of modern
British government. Brown has a golden chance to stamp his mark on his
regime and plan an Olympics fit for the 21st century.
simon.jenkins@sunday-times.co.uk
