July 2009 Archives

The International Broadcast Centre really is springing out of the ground as this picture taken today and plonked on the London 2012 official website proves.

As ever when something happens on the Olympics site someone is unhappy and this time it's the guys at Lea Bank Square who are getting hacked off with all the Olympics "Noise and Dust". Read here to enjoy ongoing correspondence between the Lea Bank lovers and the "suits" building the IBC.

They acre currently arranging an Olympics "Noise and Dust" meeting with the building contractor Skanska.

As Dave Hill's blog points out the redoubtable Sona - the Lea Bank Square Olympic Spy - is not going to let any one take any liberties when building out the site and fair play to her for that.

Not sure how often the boys working for Skanska have been referred to as the "suits" before however.

A report from Hometrack Data Systems for Bloomberg published today makes for gloomy reading for those who have begun investing in east London's Stratford in the hope that the 2012 Olympics is going to lift values in the area.
House prices in Stratford are not just falling like they are every where else in London but falling faster than in the rest of the capital as a whole, says Bloomberg.
Average home sale prices in the E15 postcode area where the Olympic village is being built fell 10.9% to £197,000 in the year to July.

The story in the Evening Standard this morning about the immediate political machinations suggesting the Stratford Olympic Stadium as a natural venue for the Rugby World Cup games when the tournament comes to England in 2015 is one of those no-brainers that I never quite got around to writing yesterday.
As soon as it was announced that England had won the bid to host the tournament yesterday it was patently obvious that those who want a genuine sporting legacy for the Olympic stadium would leap on the suggestion that it is highly suited for international rugby.
All I needed to do was put a call in to the Baroness or Boris - both clearly are batting for the 80,0000-seat stadium to remain just that post-Games - and ask them whether it should host the rugby world cup final three years after the Games and clearly had they been answering to me they would have said yes.
To my shame I was somewhat busy with a few other stories, but still it's great to see Boris so speedily seeking to capitalise on the news.

It's all gone a bit quiet on the eastern front when it comes to Hackney Wick's Olympics International Broadcasting Centre and Media Centre.

There is plenty of work on site just now (as Dave Hill's latest blog posting and the Leabank Square blog reveal) but don't be fooled into thinking that all of the concerns surrounding the Legacy use of the complex after the 2012 Games have been addressed.

I am told that Hackney council and the East London Business Alliance are keeping their respective powders dry while Baroness Ford and Andrew Altman bed down the new Olympics Legacy Vehicle and review the proposals.

In October, Ford and Altman are proposing to visit the site alongside the East London Business Alliance and a number of prospective tenants to discuss how the site can be developed to meet modern media and broadcast requirements.

The vehicle and the LDA are also preparing a draft prospectus for potential occupiers. It sounds positive for Hackney and its ambitions for a major employment generator but clearly there is much to resolve before the likes of ITV start upping sticks and heading east.

As Dave Hill's blog points out today, the success or not of the Hackney Wick centre post Games will be a central test of how beneficial the Olympics really has been for East London

  By all accounts, Mayor of London Boris Johnson yesterday opined the fact that there is no high street included in the plans for the 2012 Olympic Village, with residents expected to do their shopping in the nearby Westfield Centre in Stratford.
I wasn't there and I'm afraid the link to it keeps crashing on the LDA website, but I am reliably informed by this Regeneration and Renewal story that while speaking at a London Assembly plenary meeting on Tuesday the mayor bemoaned the village's lack of "active frontage" eg retail and offices at ground level. He reportedly said this was vital if the village was not to become "simply" a housing estate.
It seems an odd thing to say if you have been to the site.

News reaches me that the proposed transfer of the Olympics Legacy work from the LDA's Olympics Legacy Directorate to the new Olympic Legacy company headed by Baroness Margaret Ford and Andrew Altman is proving unsurprisingly unsettling.
Staff working on the Olympic Opportunities side of the Directorate rather than the land side - which has been in the news recently as the focus of a KPMG audit - are though to be a little concerned that they will be seen as surplus to requirement.
Well here is some good news from the LDA.

Following on from the splendid story that filtered out last week about well-known property figure Anthony Spencer's drive (if you will excuse the lame pun) to bring an annual motor Grand Prix to the Olympic Park post Games I've been told about a similarly unlikely but exciting proposal.
According to the Standard Spencer approached the ODA with a £100m proposal for a "figure-of-eight course using roads built for the Games".
News reaches me now that the ODA and LDA at some stage in the not-too-distant past received an approach from hotel, leisure and gaming giant Las Vegas Sands and Think London about potentially creating a giant casino-based theme park at the site post-Games.

The ODA has published its annual reports and accounts which you can view here and of course it would make for spectacularly scary reading if it wasn't all being underwritten by the government.

The accounts for 2008-09 reveal a deficit of £642,865,000 (2007-08: £269,275,000) which the ODA says has arisen mainly because of the accounting treatment of Grant in Aid which is not matched by income in the Income and Expenditure Account.

Fortunately it says that following discussions with its funders - the DCMS, the Olympic Lottery Distributor (OLD) and the Greater London Authority (GLA) - it is "confident that resources will be secured to enable the ODA to meet its financial and operational objectives".

They are certainly an understanding bunch.

According to a new Metropolitan Police Authority report (which in fairness is not named or pointed to anywhere in the article I picked it up from, but hey this one is too good to check) one profession is going to do well out of the 2012 Olympics.

And I'm afraid it's the oldest one.

The Waltham Forest Guardian writes that the Met has published a report warning that "visitors, athletes and workers at the Stratford site are expected to fuel the sex industry boom".

Perhaps the LDA should be tapping up this lucrative market to cover its funding shortfall for the Olympic land.

Just to say that if any one wants to hear LDA chief financial officer Andrew Travers opening up at last about the gaping hole in its Olympic land budget you can do so here.

There is little in the way of details about the estimated £60m-£100m that is missing - we will have to wait for the KPMG recommendations and report which will be out soon - but there were some seriously worrying admissions.

Travers said there had been a "considerable overspend" on fees and costs and that the LDA would have to divert the funding from other existing projects and programmes.

It's perhaps not a great surprise that the government has backed the London Development Agency in a crucial planning appeal that could have added tens of millions of pounds to the compensation bill for businesses relocated to make way for the 2012 Olympics Games.
What is more interesting now is what the disgruntled landowners who thought they had a very strong case are going to do in response.
The case saw building group Rooff, advised by Jones Lang LaSalle and law firm Finers Stephens Innocent, argue that the LDA is underpaying for its land at the Carpenter's Estate in Stratford, east London.
It claims that Newham council's policy framework supports the site being valued as suitable for residential use, rather than the lower-value employment use on which the LDA based its offer.

I've just been sifting through the Draft minutes of the Olympic Delivery Authority's 23 June planning meeting to approve the £355m Olympics media centre and it makes for fairly diverting reading.

You can read the full details for yourself here Item 4 - DRAFT Minutes of 47th Planning Committee Minutes 23 June 2009.pdfbut the first thing that jumps out is Hackney council's ongoing worry that the government is somehow diluting its original commitment to making the development the main creator of jobs, and therefore regenerator or east London, post-Games.

Hackney council's Cabinet Member for Regeneration and the 2012 Olympic Games and Paralympic Games Guy Nicholson made representations to the Committee saying that although the parties had "come a long way" with revised plans for the centre, the "revised recommendation, when compared with the original recommendation, has watered down the obligations on employment legacy and no longer includes financial penalty for loss of employment space".

I've been away for a couple of days laying a patio at home and avoiding the Michael Jackson coverage as much as possible (that is of course entirely extraneous information) and as always while I have been off there has been an avalanche of activity at the Olympics site.

 The first thing that has caught my attention on my return is the growing certainty in the market that the 1,439 private houses being built for the Olympics Village are uppermost in the Homes and Communities Agency's mind as it sifts through the reassuringly large number of expressions of interest in creating a private rented housing sector in the UK.

Of the 64 parties that have expressed interest in the pioneering proposals I understand HCA is currently focusing on a handful of heavyweight contenders with particularly exciting propositions coming from big pension funds and fund managers thought to include Legal & General, Schroders and Aviva.

And once again the private element of the Athletes' Village is being talked up as having the ideal scale and profile for a pilot.