London Olympic Games and Paralympic Games (Amendment) Bill

My Lords, I tried to get my name down to this amendment, because this is a very important debate. I am afraid that I managed to mess that process up, as I did when I tried to draft an amendment for a similar type of discussion. The idea that this Olympics went beyond purely the Games themselves is a very good aspiration. However, it has proved fairly difficult to deliver. To be perfectly honest, it seems that the more the Government are involved in those aims, the worse we have done. I use the word ““Government”” to mean the Treasury Bench and whoever is in charge. When the Olympic movement itself was in charge, it brought more concrete and sustainable things and seemed to do rather better. That is the impression that I have at the moment. We had targets under the previous Government and we had arguments about double accounting and what it meant. One thing that we may discover from this is the limitations of government involvement to achieve certain things. Looking at this we can get some idea of what we can and cannot achieve, with reasonable levels of effort, and we will be able to take something very valuable away with us for the next time we have a huge event. The Olympics is the ultimate pan-national event. We have learnt from the delivery of various things what went wrong in Athens and right in Sydney, et cetera. The fact that we can pass this information on to the next cities to host the Games will be a good thing. If government piggybacks on the Olympics to achieve something, we should know what has and has not been achieved. I suggest that we could go on with this matter for some considerable time. The questions raised in the amendment are quite profound as regards what has happened in the Olympics and where we go, and the relative successes and failures that there will be in the process. When I was trying to draw up an amendment, without getting too complicated or esoteric, I might have excluded paragraph (c) from the discussion, for the simple reason that it will be easy to judge that matter, and most of the activity there seems to have been reasonably successful. Once again, I think this is a question about what government can achieve and cannot achieve. I would hope that, for instance, the first beneficiary of this information would probably be Glasgow and the Commonwealth Games, and all future Games. It is very easy to forget that there has to be a continuum, a legacy; it is not just a one-off event. I hope that the Minister will be able to give us some idea about the government thinking as regards their involvement, learning lessons and backing up successes and not repeating failures.