The 2012 Games risk becoming a sporting parallel to RBS: soaking up billions of public money, then handing benefits to private sector.
Here are some universal truths about the Olympics. First, the sales pitch rarely falls below hyperbolic, and second, public commentary is sceptical, if not downright critical, until the final countdown. And third, achieving the legacy – now almost an Olympic sport in itself – is continually open to critical examination. So the ambition of the Strategic Regeneration Framework is breathtaking. It requires the Olympic effect to eliminate the social and economic inequalities between the six host boroughs and the rest of London within 20 years. However great the success of the Games themselves, they will – according to the Framework – be remembered by whether they raise skills, cut unemployment, improve health and regenerate the physical environment of the Games' neighbourhood. That makes it sound as if what happens to the beautiful new stadia and stunning aquatics centre and the Olympic village is almost irrelevant. Yet their continued success at bringing in people and cash is key to tackling the area's long history of poverty and deprivation, rather than letting inequality persist alongside the shiny shopping centres and private estates.
The question is whether the local boroughs have the tools to pull it off. The London Olympics risk becoming a sporting parallel to RBS: soaking up billions of public money, then handing the benefits to the private sector. Early promises have already been abandoned: not only the targets for increasing sports participation (undermined by the coalition swinging the axe on school sports) but ones that were even more important locally, like the commitment to ensure the development prioritised jobs, training and apprenticeships in the Olympic boroughs, or their own attempt to set and monitor goals which makes gloomy reading on topics like neighbourhood satisfaction. On these pages last week, Anna Minton criticised the privatisation of the legacy and lamented the decline of the idea of the public good. In truth, the rhetoric survives; it's the substance that's questionable.
It would be foolish to suppose that public money alone can sustain the Olympics legacy. But the private sector has to be made to deliver. That means enforceable public obligations, not ones that can be wriggled out of the way the ODA ducked its local jobs duty. It means making sure the future of the revenue-generating parts of the site support those that don't pay their way, as the Manchester Commonwealth Games stadium, now tenanted by Manchester City, supports further regeneration. It means pulling in the punters, even at the cost of a permanent athletics track. And it means making sure that the regeneration gurus at Sheffield Hallam University are wrong when they predict that the biggest Olympic winners will be the folk who make sports clothing.
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