Is it too early to call it a crisis? On the surface, yes.
EGi News has just revealed that a crucial agreement that would see the London Development Agency transfer its Olympic land and circa £800m land assembly debt pile to Treasury has stalled and will be delayed by up to six months.
An LDA Board meeting had been convened to rubberstamp the agreement this morning. But a report from the LDA's corporate finance team published yesterday evening ahead of the meeting called for its "current transitional arrangements" to be extended for a further six months to "enable a satisfactory resolution to be found".
While the official LDA line is that this is a complex deal and there will be a resolution sooner rather than later, reading between the lines there are real concerns that it is just not going to happen.
January 2010 Archives
Quite an interesting tale from Building Design about Fletcher Priest Architects and the ODA's detailed plans for how athletes and officials will be housed in the athletes village in east
BD writes that the plans, lodged this week, will see athletes eat in large communal dining halls, while one-bedroom flats will accommodate up to four athletes, a two-bedroom home will house six, and up to eight athletes will be accommodated in three-bedroom flats and four-bedroom town houses.
It adds that, at 40ha, the village will be significantly smaller than the equivalent at both the
Let's hope the
As you can see here, the LDA has just announced on its website that tomorrow morning at an 8.15am Board meeting it will discuss the "Olympic Park Legacy Company set up and transfer of functions".
Much of this crucial meeting will be held in private but there is a public session. Negotiations with central Government are clearly coming to a head so I will be reporting on the outcome tomorrow.
A quick update on the LDA and central government's negotiations over the transfer of the agency's £936m of Olympics land debt and only because crunch time really is looming.
The LDA told me today that an extraordinary Board meeting will be held in private on Friday morning seeking sign off the proposed deal.
I am being given no steer as to whether the respective parties are hopeful or not about a resolution. As noted last week however there can be no guarantees on this one. Peter Bishop, deputy chief executive of the LDA, has suggested that the government is offering a figure of around £500m for the land.
Given that the LDA's most recent figures reported that, in the period to end of 2008, the agency had spent £936m on land assembly and remediation for the Olympic Park, this may not be to everyone's liking.
It is a truism that the most widely read news stories in any publication involve bad news or what journalists like to call "people stories". Combine the two and you will please your editor.
In spite of this job remit, it would be churlish be negative about the Olympic Delivery Authority's updated plans for Stratford's Olympic Park post 2012, which seem to be a good thing all round for east London.
The ODA says it is creating a 250 parklands that will be the largest new urban park in the UK for over 100 years. I'm sure that is true but, whatever, it is very big and it is very green and a significant improvement on the brown fields that previously inhabited the area. You can see pictures of what the ODA and the OPLC are planning here
This week it's been frustratingly hard trying to get to the bottom of the deal that is being finalised between the LDA and central government over the transfer of Olympics land and debt.
On Tuesday Peter Bishop deputy chief executive of the LDA told a London Assembly meeting that details of the deal, which will see the agency transfer the land acquired for the 2012 Olympics Game and associated debt transferred to central government, could not be discussed ahead of an imminent announcement.
Bishop suggested that the announcement would be made at a Board meeting of the LDA at Palestra the next day (Wednesday).
So West Ham's new owners are confident that the government will rubberstamp a move to the 2012 Olympics Stadium.
On the face of it David Sullivan and David Gold's aspirations for the Hammers to play in the 80,000-seat stadium after the Games ends is the ideal solution for all concerned.
The new owners have been quick to point out the club's dire financial situation and a move from the 35,000-capacity Upton Park would massively swell the coffers.
"If we could get this huge ground, we could take football back to the people," Sullivan said. "We could reduce the admission prices to the cheapest in the Premier League because we would have the capacity to do it."
The old chestnut of ITV moving to Hackney Wick's 1.1m sq ft Olympics International Broadcast Centre has reared its head again.
Just before Christmas the Department of Culture, Media and Sport Committee grilled the ODA and LOCOG about progress on the Olympics Games.
ODA chief David Higgins when questioned by Paul Farrelly about progress on the centre encouragingly said: "It will be a conventional office building and already there are media companies, one in particular, which are thinking of taking space in there. It is years away, of course, but there are organisations that have expressed interest."
I'm embarrassingly behind the times with this but, in my defence, I can't see it written about elsewhere so have decided to publish and be damned.
The LDA will be forced to cut spending by £50m or 30% because of its overspend on the Olympic Games.
Peter Rogers confirmed the budget cut at a 2 December meeting with the London Assembly which I am afraid to say I missed entirely.
Rogers said the LDA's Olympics overspend would reduce its programmes elsewhere over the coming year by £50m.
"Our budget next year will be 30% less as a result of the Olympics overrun than it would be without the overrun."
Elsewhere further evidence emerged that crucial talks to transfer the London Development Agency's Olympics land and debt to government and the new OPLC are not running entirely smoothly.
Lord Falconer chaired a wide-ranging debate in the House of Lords on yesterday evening on progress being made in readying the UK for the Olympic Games.
There were plenty of probing and difficult questions asked as you can read here.
The London Development Agency is to fully comply with the Information Commissioner's Freedom of Information Act request for information relating to the acquisition of land for the 2012 Olympics Games, I can reveal.
After my blog posting a few days ago about Commissioner Christopher Graham revealing in a Daily Telegraph article on 20 December that he had threatened the LDA with contempt of court charges for its failure to disclose under the FOI Act the agency contacted me to update on its position.
In a statement it said: "The LDA plans to release the information required under the Information Commissioner's recent ruling.
"When the original request was made in September of 2008, we kept the sums of compensation that had been paid on these sites confidential to protect our negotiating position in other claims. Since then, our negotiations with the relevant freeholders have progressed and the release of this information will not adversely affect our negotiations and our duty to protect the public purse."
Enough said.
