Lord Addington (LD)

I managed to avoid false starting the two Paralympians this time. We are back to asking whether the Bill is wide enough to enable itself to do what it has to do within the known requirements of hosting an Olympic Games. It probably looks about right for a championship that is using existing infrastructure. Even if the Olympics or the Commonwealth Games want us to use that where we can, you may well have to construct something new and possibly something temporary. All these elements have been in both of those things and at very different scales. But if this is going to be something new, in the case of the Olympics particularly, it seems to change what it wants over time, because it is an evolving thing. The London Olympics changed the expectation of how much change and benefit you could bring. It actually has been a solid thing, and that was based on many, many hours in Committee—I know because I was there—when the Government of the day said, “Let’s get this right, or at least get a framework, or at least ask, even, as a training exercise, what it would look like”. I think half the time the Government did not expect to have to implement it, but that is merely the observation of somebody who sat there through Committee. So there will have to be something new, and where in the current thinking does it fit in, if we have to do that? I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, enjoyed his little sabbatical, but it is better to have him back. I say that as one who dodged that. But where are we going to get that little bit of interaction? If it is needed, where is the space for it? You cannot know. You can hope and you can prepare the ground, but if we have to do something different, where is the flexibility? I think there would be, shall we say, around the House, a degree of sympathy if you had to change the Bill to bring a little bit of flexibility in here, if it was needed. I do not think too many people would object. In this debate we are trying to find out whether we need to do something else. If the Olympics change, if the Commonwealth Games change or even if the World Cup changes and we want something else in there and still think it is worth doing, how do we accommodate that? In this Bill, where do the Government say that there is the flexibility to say that this bit will not apply and that we have to do something else? To future-proof the Bill, to an extent, we will have to do that. We got some of the answer to that in a previous debate, but I look forward to hearing how much more thought the Government have put into doing this. It is a real question that we need an answer for, and the Bill probably has to have a degree of flexibility put in at its heart. We want this to succeed. The Bill will have completely failed if we have to go back and redraft something else. We do not want to do that. What is the Minister doing to prevent that?