Lord Mawson (CB)

My Lords, I support this amendment. But, when you have spent many years at the other end of the telescope of these large events and have responsibilities for building the kit, enabling it all to work and making sure that it integrates in those communities, the detail really matters. One of the things we managed to achieve with the London Olympics—which was in no small part to do with the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, Lord Coe and others—was to get cross-party support for this very big event, which we knew would probably go through different Governments and Mayors of London, and actually I think we achieved that. It was a very big and long event—and, by the way, we are still building out the Olympic Park today, so it was a big thing. It is really important that, while there needs to be responsibility for large amounts of taxpayers’ money— I absolutely get that—if we are serious about these events, there also needs to be responsibility among our political parties to get cross-party agreement very early on. That needs to happen not only at a national level. One or two of our colleagues in east London who were involved in the Labour councils there—I mention in particular my colleague Paul Brickell, who was a Labour councillor in Newham and ended up playing the lead role in regeneration as executive director—spent a lot of time building working relationships with the five Labour boroughs surrounding the Olympic Park, which when we began had a long history of being at war with each other. There was a lot of detailed work over cups of tea to build the relationships that support events such as this. So, although I am in favour of being very careful about the money and get all of that, if we are serious about going for these events, there is a responsibility across our political parties to build working relationships early on and come to an agreement, so that those of us on the leading edge with day-to-day responsibility to make fast decisions tomorrow will not be held up by politics being played out on them somewhere else.