2012 Olympics: Another leak.

Oh look more money wasted:

Ministers ignored evidence from their own experts who found scant social or economic justification for bidding for the 2012 Olympics,The Times has learnt.

A 250-page strategy document, signed off in December 2002 by Tony Blair as Prime Minister but selectively distributed, found little support for the claim that the Games would produce significant economic returns or more people playing sport.

The Game Plan document, whose findings are not widely known even in sport’s upper echelons, has emerged as Games chiefs meet today to agree funding cuts for Olympic sports such as basketball and hockey.

UK Sport, the funding agency for lottery cash, has a £79 million shortfall in its £300 million budget because hoped-for private sponsors have been hit by the credit crunch. The existence of the report will strengthen calls for an “Austerity Games” in the image of 1948, when London was last host city, as the recession forces a squeeze on public spending in 2012-13.

Leading economists and civil servants commissioned by the Prime Minister’s strategy unit and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport found that the main motivation for staging the 16-day event should be a morale-boosting national party.

John Clark, the report’s chief author, told The Times: “We concluded that countries should host the Olympics only for reasons of national celebration because the economic rationale is weak.”

Researched for nearly a year by ten experts, Game Plan was intended as a framework for sports policy for the next decade – in particular, whether Britain should bid for events such as the Olympics and the World Cup.

Instead it was quietly forgotten when it did not present a strong case for a bid. Civil servants watered down the findings but the final draft was still unhelpful to bid champions within the Government, an unnamed source told The Times.

“This was a robust report that showed why we should not bid for the Olympics but it was an inconvenient truth. Almost the moment the ink was dry, there was a volte-face,” said Stefan Szymanski, a professor at Cass Business School.

“The justification for bidding should have been based on evidence placed in the public domain. Instead key evidence was suppressed or ignored.”

The revelations raise the question of why ministers backed a bid citing reasons dismissed by their own experts. Tessa Jowell, the Olympics Minister who sponsored Game Plan, admitted this month that a bid would probably not have been pursued if a recession had been foreseen.

Alex Story, a former Olympic rower who monitors 2012 for the Taxpayers’ Alliance, said: “On both the cost and the benefits to youngsters, ministers oversold the Games. It was a false prospectus; they knew it was unrealistic.”

New Labour finding ever more bizarre ways to piss your tax money up against the wall. Only Labour could hire experts to cost the Olympics, then decide to bury the report that we have paid for through our taxes.

But don't worry we can all wave a flag then sit back and await our higher Community Charge bills in order to pay for it.

I wonder if one bovine faced kebab eating Home Sec. by the name of Jacqui Smith is going to be giving the nod to the police to find who leaked this and arrest them? Or does that just apply to MP's?

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