Olympic legacy projects to be cut by £21 million after accounts bungle

Artist impression of what the Olympic should look like
12 April 2012

Projects intended to deliver a legacy of the 2012 Olympics have been cut by the London Development Agency after a bungled land deal blew a £160 million hole in its budget.

There will be reductions of more than £21 million this year affecting 2012-related programmes run by the LDA, undermining Boris Johnson's aim of using the Games to make Londoners more active and improve their employment chances.

The LDA has been forced to make the cutbacks after poor internal accounting was blamed for the cost of buying the 500-acre Olympic site in Stratford rising to £1.1 billion.

At its board meeting today, the LDA will submit cost-cutting proposals with the axe due to fall on a dozen Olympics schemes. Savings will be made by:

* A £2 million cut in funding to High Street 2012, a facelift to the final stretch of the marathon route in Tower Hamlets and Newham.

* A £1 million cut to Art in the Park, a project backed by Tate director Sir Nicholas Serota to decorate bridges and underpasses in the Olympic Park.

* A £1.6 million cut to the skills and jobs scheme for the five Olympic boroughs and a £5 million cut to redundancy prevention for smaller businesses.

* Scrapping the £170,000 scheme to support the disabled in Olympic jobs.

* Scrapping the £150,000 study to count the jobs created by the Games and cutting an Olympic legacy evaluation by £25,000.

* Cutting a taxi driver diversity programme by £150,000.

* Cutting the Building Energy Efficiency Programme by £2.5 million.

A further £250,000 will be saved on schemes for volunteers at sports events, training young sports officials and umpires and promoting the business benefits of the Games.

Critics say the cuts will deny Londoners advantages from the Olympics. Conservative London Assembly member Andrew Boff said: "We are effectively going back on some of the promises made about hosting the Games. While the bricks and mortar projects of the Olympic sports venues are having cash lavished on them the legacy is being undermined."

The disability charity Scope attacked the cuts to the employment scheme. Its director of policy and campaigns, Ruth Scott, said: "If this scheme was not found to demonstrate good value for money then consideration should be given to developing an alternative scheme that does, instead of scrapping it."

An LDA spokesman said: "If the system of improved financial controls had been in place earlier we would have identified these projects and stopped them then. Lots of these projects are on a three-year cycle and would have come to an end this year anyway."

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