Andrew Rawnsley: The ruinously expensive folly of this mad five-ring circus
From Wembley Stadium to the Scottish Parliament building - oh, and did I mention the Millennium Dome? - Britain has a miserable record at bringing in big infrastructure projects on time and on budget. The crucial difference with the Olympics is that they can’t be postponed which means they are even more likely to inflate in cost. When Wembley wasn’t ready, at least the FA Cup Final could be moved to Cardiff. The deadline for the Olympics is an iron one. You can’t tell the world that you’re a bit behind and would they kindly come back in 2013.
The Olympic contracts are not fixed-price contracts. Every landowner, developer, contractor and builder, from the corporate suits to the sparks installing the lighting has been handed a loaded revolver to put to the head of the government. Pay up - or the Games get it. Whatever figure anyone is giving you at the moment, the real cost is going to be even more stratospheric. £8bn? Do I hear £10bn? The man who designed the Montreal Olympic park reckons we will eventually be landed with a bill of not less than £15bn for an event to which only the very wealthy and the very well-connected will get a ticket.
Posted on November 26th, 2006 at 2:34 pm
But it’s odd, because I could hav sworn these were private sector contracts and everybody knows how the private sector is.
(Unfunny and rhetorical, I know, but still, not so much a point as the point.)
You can’t tell the world that you’re a bit behind and would they kindly come back in 2013.
So where’s Seb Coe, the miracle man?
As one of the comments on the Rawnsley article says, how is it possible to take people like this seriously when they come up with sentences like ‘In the time that it takes you to read to the end of this sentence, the cost of the London Olympics will have risen by another billion pounds’? Our journos talk almost as much rubbish as our esteemed leaders.