What will the Olympics do for London?

Marking the 10th anniversary of London 2012, two books have now appeared from those closely involved both in winning the Games for London and, more importantly, in securing their legacy. ?The Guardian’s London commentator at the time, Dave Hill’s Olympic Park – When Britain Built Something Big will, for some time, be the definitive narrative; how, when faced with an immoveable deadline and the eyes of the world on London, we more than rose to the challenge.

Now comes a study from those who made it happen. Play the Game is an oral history of this “grand project” in the words of the politicians, and the cast of less-heralded planners and project managers.?It was their vision for East London, founded on the city’s hosting the Games for the third time, which helped to secure a physical, economic and social legacy for London and, arguably, in the context of Levelling Up, the rest of the UK. ?London 2012: a spectacular show of equality, growth and innovation (olympics.com)

A visit last weekend to the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, hosted by the book’s authors, Michael Owens and Ralph Ward, prompted me to revisit this piece which I wrote back in August 2012.??It shows, from just one angle, how the Government, London’s development agencies and private sector partners, were battling against the odds. ?

(From August 2012)

What will the Olympics achieve in the long term??After years in the planning, the Games’ opening ceremony this Friday finally marks the start of international competition which, for a few weeks at least, should silence the doubters who question the value of the ￡9bn price tag.?

Back in 2004, Rocket Science played a part in the London Development Agency’s efforts to prepare a winning bid to host the Games in London for the first time since 1948. “Live, Work, Visit” was a compendium of facts and figures highlighting the positive impact that the greatest show on earth could have on the capital’s residents, work force and visitors.

Flying in the face of research (including some commissioned by the London Assembly) which questioned the long-term impact of previous Olympic Games, the London bid promised many things in order to win over, firstly, a sceptical British public and then the notoriously demanding International Olympic Committee. These included, legacy, sustainability, convergence and even deliverance. ?Each of these abstract nouns were to become common parlance among Olympic proponents (and fans of Twenty Twelve). But what do they really mean, for example, in terms of the Games’ impact on employment?

One of the central planks of London’s bid was the Games’ potential as an agent of regeneration of a de-industrialised area of East London, long blighted by high levels of unemployment and social deprivation. Even after the onset of the recession, Gordon Brown’s government continued to claim that London 2012 represented an important “job creator and growth generator” which would buck the economic downturn and create 30,000 jobs for the Olympics and 50,000 permanent jobs thereafter.

The Olympic host boroughs’ tried to capture the opportunity by jointly delivering a Convergence Strategy. (Convergence is the principle for the regeneration of the area, with the overriding objective that within 20 years the communities that hosted the 2012 Games will have the same social and economic chances as the rest of London).?In the run up to the Games, it has been difficult to tell to what extent the host boroughs, supported by the Greater London Authority, have made inroads on their Convergence target for employment. According to one of the local MPs, at the beginning of 2011 only 201 Olympic jobs were held by Tower Hamlets residents. Since then, the Games have brought more than 8,500 jobs to the five host boroughs, though this is well short of the 20,000 that they aspired to.

Two contrasting items of news this week throw the spotlight once again on the opportunity and challenge of harnessing job outcomes from the Olympics.?On the one hand, the latest labour market figures show unemployment declined for a fourth successive month to its lowest level since last summer (2.58 million people). The ONS said the strong performance of London – with the capital registering 61,000 more people in employment over the period – indicated an Olympics link.?On the other hand, the fallout from the failure of G4S to recruit sufficient security staff for the Games points to a combination of gross incompetence on the part of the second biggest private sector employer in the world, but also a lack of coordination on the part of the government.

Having been awarded the Games’ security contract back in 2009, G4S was widely assumed to be a shoe in for one of the three prime contracts to deliver the Work Programme in East London which would have created a conveyor belt of recruits (and additional funding for the requisite pre-employment training) for the Games-time jobs. Even without the Work Programme Prime Contact, G4S still have questions to answer as to why some of the 3500 jobs they failed to fill did not go to some of the thousands of unemployed Londoners; the Host Boroughs Unit alone sent the company over 17000 candidates who met their minimum standard and whom G4S said they would train.

All of which suggests that the GLA’s job of measuring the long-term employment impact from London’s hosting the Games of 2012 will be a fraught and contentious task. ?But, as one of the leading Games’ sceptics, Simon Jenkins, wrote in the Guardian, people will be looking for answers, as “when bidden to mute ecstasy by politicians who have just blown ￡9bn on national pride, grownup citizens have every right to count their spoons.”