The consultants given the task of keeping down the bill for the London Olympics cost the taxpayer £87 million in the last financial year, a government report revealed yesterday.

CLM’s fee accounted for 15 per cent of the £563 million spent by the Olympic Delivery Authority (ODA) in the financial year that ended in March.

The consortium includes Laing O’Rourke, Mace, the British management company, and the programme manager CH2M Hill. It worked on the Atlanta and Sydney Games and is also involved with the Beijing Olympics. It was appointed to oversee the building of arenas, infrastructure and the Olympic village.

The authority’s accounts also show that Olympic chiefs were rewarded with generous pay rises last year as other public sector workers fought for above-inflation wage increases.

Staff costs at the ODA, the government agency building the infrastructure for the 2012 Games, leapt by 36 per cent year on year, from £18.7 million to £29.2 million.

The pay packages of senior managers, according to the annual report, jumped by between 10 per cent and 15 per cent. The highest-paid director was David Higgins, the Australian chief executive, formerly of English Partnerships, who was paid £624,000, including performance-related bonuses. He is due to receive additional bonuses in August in line with key construction targets that have been met ahead of schedule.

The lowest-paid member of the eight-strong senior management team at the ODA was paid £243,000. The director of design and regeneration received £290,000, compared with £204,000 for nine months of the previous year.

Unions, rallying their members for strike action over the coming months amid a squeeze on public spending, reacted with dismay. “What a shame that not all public service staff get the same treatment,” a Unison spokesman said. “Hundreds of thousands of Unison members working in local government, currently in dispute over a 2.45 per cent pay offer, would have been over the moon if they were offered some of the increases seen by Olympic staff.”

The ODA said that it needed to pay top salaries to attract “high-calibre” managers from all over the world for a multibillion construction programme that cannot overrun because there is a fixed deadline. The budget is agreed with the Department for Culture, Media and Sport.

“This is a project without precedent,” John Armitt, the ODA chairman, said. “The remuneration of the senior management team reflects the scale of this challenge and is consistent with industry market levels. It also reflects the good progress that has been made in preparing the Olympic Park site in the last year. We have started construction early and are on track.”

The ODA managers are widely considered to be among the best in their respective businesses but this will be little comfort to council workers taking a real-term pay cut with the main inflation index standing at 3.8 per cent in June amid soaring rising fuel and food prices.

Despite their pay increases, inflation is still a worry for Olympic chiefs trying to keep the 2012 project within its agreed £9.3 billion budget.

Rising steel prices have pushed up the cost of key venues such as the £496 million Olympic Stadium and the £303 million aquatics centre.

Last year the ODA spent £858 million, compared with £966 million under its budget. The difference was accounted for by cost savings made along the way and delays that mean work on key venues, such as the £1 billion athletes’ village and the canoe centre at Broxbourne, has yet to start.

Mr Higgins said that the ODA was on track but said the “tightest possible financial control” must be exerted because of the credit crunch and the deteriorating property market.

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