“Despite the £5.9bn increase in the public funding for the Games, the DCMS has not specified what will be delivered in return for this expenditure and the current budget cannot be reconciled to the commitments in the original bid,” it said.
Surprise, surprise.
Labour sold the idea of London hosting the Olympics with a price tag of £4bn. The PAC has found that...
...“It is now clear that the estimated cost at the time of the bid, just over £4bn, was entirely unrealistic.”
Elsewhere in the damning report, it labels...
...government’s evaluation of the cost of hosting the Olympic Games as being “wishful thinking”.
That's being rather charitable:
... Department of Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) had ignored foreseeable major factors such as tax and security in its initial budget.
If that's the case, the word I would use is fraud: This is the sort of ploy one would expect from a firm of cowboy builders. Like some overly-trusting OAP, the British public is being fleeced by Jowell, Livingstone and Coe into wasting billions in something that is actually going to deliver fuck-all benefit to anyone.
The Olympics were already shaping up to be an absolute farce long before the first Polish builder sank his spade into the soil of East London. Remember the £4m wasted on that stupid logo? The outcome is predictable and inevitable: A massively inflated bill for a whole load of facilities that we didn't want and don't need. There has not been any clear statement about where this extra money is going to be spent, and why it wasn't costed as part of the original plans, when it clearly should have been.
If Tessa Jowell ran a building firm along these lines, she could be had up in court for fraud. But then, it wouldn't be the first time a member of that particular family firm had been up before the beak.
