The TaxPayers' Alliance - 2012 Watchdog

Guzzling At The Olympic Trough

Click on image to enlarge

According to the Sunday Times, guzzling at the 2012 trough has plumbed new depths:

"Organisers of the 2012 London Olympics have block-booked 1,925 rooms in some of the capital’s most exclusive hotels for international delegates and their spouses at a cost of £10m. Top officials have been allocated 345 suites costing up to £3,000 a night at six Park Lane hotels including the Dorchester, the Hilton and Grosvenor House. Half the bill will come out of the coffers of London 2012, the Games organiser, in the most expensive block booking in Olympic history."

The rooms at the Dorchester include "the Harlequin suite, which has walls “upholstered in ivory silk” and is said to “glow with Hollywood glamour”. Elizabeth Taylor was staying in the suite when told of her multimillion-pound deal to star in the film Cleopatra".

The news should make taxpayers very angry, especially since the organisers reckon the money will not come from taxpayers. According to them, it will come out of the "private" revenue from staging the games. It's clearly escaped their notice that such revenues (if they materialise) are already spoken for to repay some of the monstrous taxpayer contibution elsewhere.

And there's more:

"The officials in London will be given the use of a fleet of 3,145 chauffeur-driven cars, despite the promise of a “green Games”. The route to the Olympic park will be cleared of traffic so they can glide to their destination in east London in about 20 minutes."

We've blogged this before but it remains an outrage. It literally is the way of Stalinist dictatorships.

Meanwhile, we've just had confirmation of something we've long feared: the £2bn Olympic Village, supposedly privately financed, is going to need a massive injection of taxpayers' money or it won't get built:

"Bovis Lend Lease, which was selected last year to construct the £2 billion Olympic Village in east London, is struggling to raise money to finance the project. A severe lack of credit in the banking system - and fears of a property price crash - have made it very difficult for any company to raise such a large sum.

Sources claimed that the problems were so severe that it was possible that taxpayers would have to provide more funding for the building plans."

Possible? We'll take that as a definite.

So is there any good news? At all?

Just this: nobody would start from here, but 2012 is at least putting up in lights just how deceitful, self-promoting, and incompetent our commissars can be. Taxpayers should take note, and remember.

The farcical Olympics budget

"Edward Leigh, the Conservative chairman of the committee, said the department "ignored foreseeable major factors" such as contingency planning, tax obligations, and policing and wider security requirements.

He added: "At the same time, the estimate of the extent to which the private sector would contribute funding towards the Games has proved little more than wishful thinking."

The Telegraph on a Public Accounts Committee reports that describes just how amateurish and unrealistic the original budget for the Olympics was.  There are too key reasons why this went so wrong, problems that exist throughout the public sector but have been particulary chronic in the running of the Olympics:

1.  The organisation is a mess

Take a look at this graph from the National Audit Office (PDF), who are trying to understand the structure that is supposed to deliver the Games:

You can click to expand it but I'm not sure it will make things any clearer.  The biggest problem is at the top.  As Edward Leigh said (PDF) when looking at this subject for an earlier report:

"There is no single person in overall control, is there?  For instance, this is a recipe for arguments and delay, particularly between whoever happens to be Secretary of State and the Mayor."

Sure enough we've seen nothing but delays and increases in costs.  The contingency established with the second, much larger, budget is already being used up in sizeable amounts.

2. Inexperienced leadership

That basics like programme contingency and security costs weren't included is an utterly amateurish mistake.  The thing is, the Olympics is being run by amateurs.  Look at this comparison between our Olympics Minister and Jack Lemley, the experienced project manager that the amateurs drove out, drawn by Wat Tyler:

"Jack Lemley:
1960-1967: Various Graduate Positions (Guy F. Atkinson Company)
1967-1969: Assistant Project Engineer — Shift Superintendent, Guy F. Atkinson Company Mica Dam Contractors
1969-1970: President, Healthcare, Inc.
1971-1972: Project Manager, Walsh-Canonie Joint Venture (Guy F. Atkinson Co.)
1972-1975: Contracts and Engineering Manager, Water Tunnel Contractors (Consortium led by Guy F. Atkinson Co.)
1975-1977: General Manager, Walsh Construction Company (Subsidiary of Guy F. Atkinson Co.) 1977-1979: Vice President, Special Assignments (Marketing), Guy F. Atkinson Co.
1979-1981, General Manager, King Khalid Military City Project, M-K Saudi Arabia Consortium
1981-1983, Vice President, Heavy and Marine Group, Morrison-Knudsen Company, Inc.
1983-1985, Group Vice President, Heavy and Marine Group, Morrison-Knudsen Company, Inc.
1985-1987: Senior Vice President, Construction Division, Morrison-Knudsen Company, Inc.
1987-1988: President and Chief Executive Officer, Blount Construction Group of Blount, Inc.
1989-1993: Chief Executive Officer, Transmanche-Link Joint Venture — TML, The Channel Tunnel Contractors
1995-2001: Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, American Ecology Corporation
1988 - present: Principal, Jack Lemley Associates

Tess:
Psychiatric social worker
Assistant director of the mental health charity MIND
MP"

The latter is in control of our £9.35 billion.

75% Say No To Olympics

"We're not idiots here. We have actually given more thought and careful planning than any other city has ever done before" (Tessa Jowell)

Today's 2012 opinion poll confirms what we always suspected: our arrogant spendthrift rulers have landed us with a huge bill for something 75% of us don't even want. The poll details are:

• 75% of us will definitely not attend
• 28% of us "have no interest in sport" at all
• 73% expect no benefit to their area
• 80% say it will not inspire them to participate in sport

Let's remind ourselves of the numbers. The official cost estimate is currently £9.3bn, or around £400 per household. But that excludes various "extras", and BOM's estimate of the all-in total is £20bn, or £800 per household.

To put it another way, if the 25% of adults who apparently want these games were billed for them directly, they would be paying about £1600 each.

The BBC are in denial, and their sports correspondents are busy explaining how it's "taking time to get the message across".

On the contrary, the message has come across loud and clear: our grandstanding politicians, cheered on by the BBC, have landed us with staging a hideously expensive event three-quarters of us simply don't want.

There could hardly be a clearer illustration of how our rulers ignore the wishes of ordinary taxpayers. Our only purpose is to pay the bills.

PS Amazingly, despite the overhwelming evidence of poor/non-existent planning pre-bid, that Tessa Jowell quote is what she actually says- see BBC vid.

2012 Aquatics Centre Costs Treble

An Olympian triumph of wishful thinking

The new Aquatics Centre for the 2012 Olympics was originally "budgeted" at £75m. A few months ago we learned it had escalated to £150m. We now find it's likely to be £214m. That's a literal trebling, which even by the dire standards of public sector procurement is a real humdinger.

The problem? Ludicrous, Olympian, wishful... er... "thinking". The Olympic Delivery Authority's own chief executive, David Higgins, now says:

"You couldn't pick a more difficult site. It's the main entry to the Olympic Park and the major roadway to the Stratford shopping centre, most of the major services to the site pass through it, it's the most contaminated part of the site. The power lines go underneath, the canal runs round it, we have found the most archaeological remains here and it's flood prone. In addition to all that you decide you want to build an iconic venue."

Now what pie-in-the-sky clowns would ever chose to do that?

Ah yes, we remember now. It was HM Government, ably assisted by Mayor Ken- the very same "winning team" who are still in charge.

We've blogged the Aquatics Centre before (see here), reporting how, contary to all best practice procurement guidelines, there is just one bidder for the contract, Balfour Beatty. They've been demanding £250m, and although the commissars have reportedly beaten them down to £214m, we're asking ourselves what quid pro quos have been offered? And will it be the fixed price contract always promised?

Commissariat spinners are now busy assuring us that this latest overrun will not blow the overall £9.3bn budget. But that's only because they've axed the planned fencing centre altogether.

And remember, we're still four years off: there's plenty of time to see costs escalate much further from here.

More On 2012 Land Values

Ken and his property market advisor

We've already blogged news of the latest "black hole" in the budget for the 2012 Olympics, but it's instructive to examine the background in a bit more detail.

The new problem arises because the land on which it's being held will not produce anything like the price envisaged when it's finally flogged off to private developers. Whereas land expert Ken Livingstone had asserted it would raise £2bn, the property industry view is that it will raise less than half that.

This should surprise nobody, in the sense that Livingstone's self-serving financial pronouncements are no longer taken seriously by anyone in the first place. But for what it's worth, last summer he claimed the sale would raise £2bn because London land values would go on rising at 20% pa for years to come.

Even at the time his own London Development Agency said the figure would be only £800m. But that wasn't what Livingstone wanted, so it seems he just came up with his own figures.

Who stands to lose? A big loser will be those lottery "good causes", which have been raided to make a massive "loan" to the Olympics. The loan will never be repaid. The other loser will be the London Development Agency, or in other words, the taxpayer.

It all goes back to the initial budget fiasco. As BOM readers will know, that saw public funding soar from the ludicrously low £2.275bn published pre-bid, to a figure four times that.

The revised £9.325bn was announced last March by Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell (see previous blogs, eg here). Announcing the figure was bad enough, but even worse for the DCMS culturati was the need to raid the lottery "good causes" fund for another £675m. That took the total Olympics raid on good causes to £1,085m. And it was on top of a further £1,010m always meant to be coming from special Sports and Olympics lotteries.

So the total planned take from lotteries was pushed up to £2.2bn, all of it effectively diverting funds from the culturati's cherished "good causes".

In an effort to hide their embarrassment, back in June, Livingstone and the DCMS cobbled together a revised Memorandum of Understanding. That set out the various budget contributions, as follows (PSFP refers to the original 2003 pre-bid Public Sector Funding Package):

• Olympic Lottery: £750 million as per the PSFP
• Sports Lottery: £340 million as per the PSFP
• National Lottery: £1,085 million ie an increased provision of £675 million
• Mayor: £925 million ie an increased provision of £300 million (not funded from increases in Council Tax or Fares)
• LDA: £250 million as per the PSFP
• Government: £5,975 million additional provision (including provision for wider security and Policing)
• Total funding provision £9,325 million

Of course, the big loser was the general taxpayer, now on the hook for £6bn. The original £2.375bn was all supposed to come from the Olympic Lottery (£750m), the Sports Lottery (£340m), the National Lottery (£410m), the Mayor (£625m), and the London Development Agency (£250m).

But the raid on the National Lottery also increased by a chunky 165%. And the Mayor was also committed to finding another £300m without increasing Council Tax or public transport Fares. Obviously some of that will have to come from much higher Congestion Charges, but how much easier to rely on soaring land values.

Which is precisely how the DCMS and Livingstone cooked up the idea of saying that the extra money being taken from good causes would get repaid post-Olympics from land sales. If land prices were assumed to rise enough, then circles could be squared, and castles of sand would become reboubts of fiscal probity.

So last June's Memorandum spelled out exactly how these assumed proceeds would be divied up between the parties. The first slice of £650m would all go to the LDA, to repay their costs in acquiring the land in the first place. The second- amazingly precise- slice of of £631m would be split £506m to partially repay the Good Causes fund, and £125m to the LDA. The third- equally precise- slice of £544m would be split £169m to Good Causes, and £375m to the LDA. Thereafter everything was to go to the LDA.

Let's just register those land acquistion costs. The LDA paid £650m for the site, and to our knowledge that has never been included in the declared 2012 budget. On closer inspection, the Memorandum also identifies £500m of LDA "costs associated with the remediation and disposal of land and buildings within the boundary of the Olympic Park, including fees and holding costs relating to those disposals". Which is another £500m not included in declared budget.

So on our reckoning, the official budget should now be increased by £1,150m for undeclared LDA land costs: the £9.325m official budget should read £10,475m.

Let's do the sums on the assumed land profits. Starting from the £650m purchase price paid out by the LDA, adding £631m for the second slice, plus £544m for the third, gives us a grand total of £1,825m. So to repay the Good Causes fund and the LDA in full, the land will have to appreciate by £1,175m, or an eye watering 80%. With the commercial property market already in trouble, that looks highly unlikely.Indeed, there's a fair chance the market will actually fall.

Bottom line?

First, we've discovered yet another £1,150m of costs, taking the official budget to £10.5bn. Second, the additional money grabbed from the Good Causes fund will never be returned in full. Third, even the LDA is most unlikely to get back more than a part of what it's stumping up. And with an estimated £500m needed to decommission the site, taxpayers should ask themselves who will then pay?

The Olympics budget crumbles again

The current budget for the Olympics was supposed to be rock solid.  While Ken Livingstone has admitted that the original budget - that was used to sell the Olympics to the British public - was just a guess.  The rise from £2.4 billion to £9.35 billion was supposed to be it.

We always had our doubts that this would last.  So did the public who, in a YouGov poll for the TaxPayers' Alliance, said they expected it to rise further.  Thus far, though, the rising budget has merely cut through the contingency that should have been saved for later in the project, when the drop-dead date starts to bite.

Now we're seeing the first new spending outside the contingency:  The Times reports that the estimates of the amount of money that can be retrieved after the Olympics from selling land have fallen to pieces:

"Ken Livingstone, the Mayor of London, and Tessa Jowell, the Olympics Minister, signed a memorandum of understanding last year stating that at least £1.8 billion would be raised in land sales after the Games. The LDA now fears that this figure, based on a 16 per cent per annum increase in land prices in Stratford, East London, over the next 15 to 20 years, is too optmistic. It told the London Assembly last week that it now plans to raise £800 million, leaving a £1 billion shortfall. About £675 million of this had been due to go to the National Lottery to repay money lent to the Games. This money could now be lost.

Land agents contacted by The Times said yesterday that even the LDA estimate, barely enough to cover the £650 million cost of the land and based on a 6 per cent rise per annum, could be too optimistic with the current flattening of the housing market. Savills, the estate agents, suggested that urban land values in East London, on and near the Olympics site, may rise by only 4 to 5 per cent per annum over the next 15 to 20 years."

The original estimate is remarkable.  16 per cent every year!  That means that in just five years the value of the land will more than double!

While stranger things have happened there is a growth in values at that rate is unlikely to be sustained.  Even a four to five per cent growth in land values seems pretty healthy.  It looks like the authorities responsible for delivering the budget have taken a guess - at best an educated one - once again.  In order to make up the shortfall the Lottery good causes budget is being raided.  The Arts Council are furious:

"Arts organisations,which have already been squeezed acted angrily to the latest news. David Barrie, Director of The Art Fund, said: “It was bad enough when we heard the Lottery was taking a hit of more than £1 billion, but if it now turns out there is no chance of getting any of this money back that would be a disaster."

And, Jeremy Hunt, Shadow Culture Secretary - at ConservativeHome - lamented another blow to  grassroots sport which strikes at, what should be, a major legacy of the Games:

"As a result of this afternoon's Statutory Instrument, which we will vote against, the grassroots sport budget will be cut by over £100,000 for every parliamentary constituency, enough to fund a 100m grass sports pitch or a floodlit multi-use games area for each one."

There are a lot of very well paid officials in the Olympics authorities.  They need to start proving their worth because at the moment they're being rewarded, with ten officials in our Public Sector Rich List, for failure.

Stairway To £20bn

Pity there aren't lessons in how to manage Olympics budgets

There's a lady who's sure

All that glitters is gold

And she's buying a stairway to heaven

The trouble is, she's buying it with our money.

Yesterday she gave us yet another update on progress so far: she's now about halfway up.

Tessa Jowell's latest Commons statement on the 2012 Olympics budget gave us rather more detail than we've had before, with key points as follows:

• Of the £9.325bn "budget" announced in March, £1.226bn has now been allocated to spending outside the Olympic Delivery Authority (ODA). That includes a hefty £0.3bn contribution towards breeding a race of "elite" superathletes (see previous blogs eg here), and £32m giving London a lick of paint (the "look of London"). It also includes security...
• Security- the estimate has now increased even further, from £600m to £838m. Remembering of course that it was originally meant to cost... er... nothing (eg see this blog)
• The ODA budget is now £6.090bn, of which £1.9bn is on site preparation and infrastructure, £1.2bn on venues (including an optimistic £0.1bn for those outside the Olympic Park), and £0.9bn for transport (just a small contribution to the much bigger £7.2bn total transport bill). There is also now an additional £0.35bn for security during construction, implying a total security bill of £1.2bn: lovely jubbly for those nice chaps in the security industry
• The remaining unallocated contingency reserve is now £2.009bn, which has clearly been fudged so that the big figure is still (just) a 2.

So will the remaining £2bn contingency reserve be enough? Well, like the man said, sometimes words have two meanings. There's a Contingency Reserve, and then there's a "contingency reserve". One is designed to cover "contingencies", and the other is designed to cover exposed political backsides.

Officials yesterday admitted there was only an 80% chance of this "contingency reserve" holding, and that they hadn't even quantified some of the risks (eg that they may need to spend even more on security). Translation- this is not going to cover all contingencies.

In reality, we haven't been told what the real contingency reserve looks like, and in all probability nobody wants to contemplate it. But here's a simple experiment you can try for yourselves at home:

The fag packet experiment

Get an old fag packet and write down this sum: £2.7bn minus £2bn equals how much of the contingency reserve has already been drawn down since it was announced in March. Answer: £0.7bn drawdown.

Now divide £0.7bn by the number of months which have passed since March. Answer: £0.08bn drawdown per month.

Now work out how many months are left between now and the 2012 opening ceremony. Answer: 54.

Now calculate 54 times £0.08bn. Answer: £4.32bn

Now explain why anyone thinks £2bn might be anything like enough to cover the remaining contingencies. Especially when each passing day makes the clock tick louder.

So £4bn? £5bn? Pick your own number.

£20bn remains the best ballpark estimate for the whole shooting match, including all associated transport infrastructure- see here for summary.

Olympics security bill continues to rise

In the bid it was estimated that security for the Olympics would cost £190 million.  That was increased to £600 million with the new budget in March.  Now the Telegraph reports that it has increased again to £1.2 billion.  The Department's assurances that the Olympics will stay on budget are including more room for manoevre each day.  "The Government admitted it could not guarantee that the overall bill will not exceed the £9.3 billion announced earlier this year" although "Tessa Jowell, the Olympics Minister, claimed that the total bill remained in line with the budget she published in March".

The truth is that, just like with Northern Rock, the Government might be able to get the money back but a lot is at risk and they aren't managing that risk well.  Pressures on the budget will really start to bite once the drop-dead date starts to loom.  It will be then that the Games' management will really start to be tested.  Unfortunately, the structures are a mess with too many bodies promising oversight and no one really in charge.  The National Audit Office produced (PDF) a graph of it all:

At the moment the budget is slipping but the organisation of the Games is a recipe for disaster when the budget really comes under pressure, which it will.

2012 Budget- Bad Faith Or Incompetence?

Radioactive Games are the priciest

Yesterday the Public Accounts Committee held their second session on the shambolic 2012 Olympics budget (for the next 28 days, you can watch the replay here).

On the table was the second 2012 report by the National Audit Office (blogged here). And on the carpet were Jonathan Stephens, Permanent Secretary, Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), and David Higgins, Chief Executive, Olympic Delivery Authority.

The PAC pulled no punches, ripping into Mr Stephens for the appallingly understated £2.375bn cost figure originally given to us by Tessa Jowell and the DCMS.

"Totally unrealistic... additional costs entirely forseeable."

"Bad faith or incompetence?"

"We can have no confidence in your ability to plan ahead."

"Appalling negation of your duties as DCMS Accounting Officer."

Now, after a mauling like that, you or I would crawl off into a corner. But somehow it all just bounces off senior politicians and public servants (cf Met Commissioner Sir Ian Blair, or the Home Secretary). They may be shown up as incompetent, deceitful, or banged to rights, but they stay right where they are.

Here's a summary of the PAC's Q&A:

Question: How can we possibly have gone from £2.375bn to £9.325bn, a jaw-dropping increase of £7bn?

Answer: The original cost of the Games at bid stage was not £2.375bn [even though that was the figure we were all given by the government's triumphal publicity machine]. No, the real figure was £4.036bn.

But from that, you have to strip out £1.044bn of regeneration costs which were always going to be separately funded by the Treasury [umm... why?], and £0.738bn of assumed contributions from the private sector. Giving us the £2.375bn figure [see figure 1 in the NAO Report... and yes, we do realise the answer isn't exactly £2.375bn, but they're not our numbers].

Question: So how much have the costs increased really?

Answer: £5.3bn- costs are up from £4bn to £9.3bn [the new budget given by Jowell in March].

Of that increase, £1.2bn comes from including VAT (not originally included), £2.4bn comes from the new programme contingency reserve (excluding tax, and not originally included; £2.7bn including tax), £0.6bn comes from additional security costs, £0.5bn comes from the ODA's own programme management costs (originally estimated at a ludicrously small £16m), and the remainder from a variety of factors including greater than anticipated construction inflation.

For future reference, here's the NAO's summary table of changes:

Question: Why wasn't a programme contingency reserve included in the original budget? Why was standard Treasury guidance on budgeting ignored? Why was it only after taxpayers had been irrevocably committed that the DCMS decided the budget ought "to include programme contingency because of the general risk of ‘optimism bias’ and more specifically because of the complexity, and scale of the Olympic programme, the interdependencies of different elements of the programme, and the immovable deadline for delivering the Games" (NAO report para 62)? Weren't all those factors obvious right from the start?

Answer: Umm...er... umm... well... anyway, the NAO says our new budget is jolly good...

Question: And why was there no adequate security budget? Why is it you've only now come up with this extra £600m? Had you never heard of Munich?

Answer: Where?

Question: Munich. I'll spell it for you M-U-N-I-C-H.

Answer: Ah well, Home Office... rapidly changing circumstances... wibble... wibble...

Question: Why was the budget for the ODA's own programme management costs ever set at the ludicrously low £16m? Given that it's since had to be increased by 3,500%?

Answer: We assumed it would be just like an Urban Development Corporation [ie a small quango presiding over bog-standard housing development, as opposed to the biggest peacetime construction project the UK government has ever attempted].

Question: Why did you assume you could get £738m of private funding, when the people advising you [the quango Partnerships UK] "had made clear that the information to support a robust analysis was not yet available" (para 31)?

Answer: It reflected the "state of knowledge at the time".

And so on.

The PAC seemed genuinely angry at the way the 2012 bid was cooked up, and the Chairman warned Stephens he could expect "a critical report". Mr Stephens didn't appear to bat an eyelid.

We are still undecided. Yes, both the politicos and the commissars have shown utter contempt for us taxpayers. And yes, there should have been a string of resignations and sackings.

But was it lies or incompetence? Hmm. It's a tough call. With this crew, either seems equally likely.


PS- Burning Our Money Olympics cost update

BOM has had requests for a break-down of our long-standing £20bn cost estimate for 2012. Originally it was a guesstimate based on the original all-in budget (summarised here) and previous over-run experience. But now we have the revised official budget, let's recap:

• ODA Olympic Park budget (March 2007)- £9.3bn, plus...
• Other sports venues (HoC Library bid summary)- £0.6bn, plus...
• Games running costs (HoC Library bid summary)- £1.5bn, plus...
• Broadcast/media facilities (HoC Library bid summary)- £0.1bn, plus...
• Associated transport infrastructure (HoC Library bid summary)- £7.2bn

Totting up those items gives a total of £18.7bn- so call it £20 bill.

Now, the organisers would no doubt object to the inclusion of the £1.5bn Games running costs, on the grounds that they are supposed to be self-financing from broadcast rights, sponsorship and ticket sales. But remember, that revenue is uncertain, whereas we're definitely on the hook for the costs.

They'd also object to including that £7.2bn transport infrastructure bill on the grounds that was "going to happen anyway". But with the Games won, we're bolted in, both to the total, and more especially, the drop-dead, and possibly highly expensive, 2012 completion date.

Also, BOM's estimate makes no additional allowance for construction cost inflation, beyond the optimistic 6% now officially assumed (nor any allowance for the estimated £4bn of extra knock-on costs inflicted on non-Olympics contruction projects- see TPA paper here).

And we're making no additional over-run allowance, beyond the £2.4bn contingency reserve now included in the base projection (remembering that the TPA has found the average over-run on UK public sector projects to be one-third, and Treasury guidance says "non-standard" civil engineering projects should allow for an over-run margin of up to 66%- see this blog).

Neither are we factoring in possible doomsday scenarios around that radioactive waste and other site contamination highlighted in the video above. Even though the ODA still hasn't bottomed the issue.

Finally, we're making no allowance for possible extra public sector contributions to building the Olympic Village. Even though that's still not bolted down, and there has already been a retreat from the original bid assumption that the entire Village would be privately funded.

All in all, BOM's sticking with its £20bn.

2012 Cogs Working Loose

Maybe Clint could sort out UK Sport

Last year we we blogged UK Sport's Grand Plan to conquer the world in 2012. For the trifling sum of £773,199,000, they promised to breed an elite cadre of Olympic superathletes who would deliver certain victory. Well, fourth place in the 2012 medals table, anyway. And they were able to be precise about the costs because they'd developed "a sophisticated investment model to determine the level of additional funding required...it is logical, measurable, and scalable."

The whole thing was plainly ludicrous, and was shredded by the Public Accounts Committee. They highlighted the dismal medal return on previous such "investments".

But needless to say, the plan is going ahead anyway. At a cost to taxpayers of £500m.

There isn't a cat's chance it will work, so the British Olympic Association launched its own competing, and conflicting, £20m masterplan.

The BOA's plan is headed by rugby coach Sir Clive Woodward, who it's said has already seen quite a few of the Olympic sports on telly. He will personally take our 25 top medal hopefuls under his own wing and turn them into winners.

Well, he won't actually take them under his own wing as such, but he has hired ten of his old mates from rugby and elsewhere as coaches and specialists.

One coach for each 2.5 Olympic hopefuls? Er, no. The plan seems to be for each of the 25 athletes to be coached by all ten coaches at once. Over the internet.

Woodward describes his coaches as "cogs", and says their role is to look into every detail that might help the individual and her regular coach improve. In things like wellness, sensory motor skills, visual performance, and kinesiology. Kind of idea.

Oh, and everyone reportedly has to watch A Fistful of Dollars as often as possible.

So what about the obvious conflict between these cogs and the numerous performance directors already working for the opposing £500m UK Sport Mission 2012 programme?

BOA chairman Lord Moynihan says there's no problem: "Any concerns are historical. We have a clear agreed vision on the best way to help the athlete."

A clear agreed vision. But have they told Woodward? Describing the fourth place medals target as "demanding", he will only say:

"If we all work together we can have a fantastic Olympic Games. We can only throw the kitchen sink at it but I believe we have got a great chance."

Translation- there is no clear agreed vision; just a huge kitchen sink being chucked around by a milling throng of tax-funded blazers.

And that's without even considering the poor bemused athletes themselves, assaulted on all sides by sports bureaucrats ticking boxes and engaging with them to somehow spin gold.