Extra £500m added to bill for London Olympics

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The extra cash will be needed to convert the Olympic park and its sports venues after the 2012 Games.

Baroness Ford, chief of the Olympic Park Legacy Company, today said that the costs were not covered under the existing £9.3billion budget.

She told the culture, media and sport select committee that the funding may come from central government, the Department for Communities and Local Government, City Hall, or a combination of the three.

Lady Ford said: "The £350 million (fund) is sometimes mistakenly called the legacy budget but that is a misconception because it is largely to discharge planning obligations. Quite a lot of things are out of the scope of that. To get the park properly up and running is quite a lot of money."

Asked whether the legacy money should have been included in the original Olympic budget, Lady Ford said: "At that stage it wasn't clear how much was needed to reinstate the park."

Lady Ford's OPLC, which co-owned by Government and City Hall, will spend the next few months checking estimates for the cost of legacy conversion supplied to them by the London Development Agency.

The LDA has estimated extra cash will be needed for the transformation of the £330 million Olympic media centre in Hackney Wick, creating parklands, adapting utilities, preparing development sites, adapting roads and bridges and removing Games-times facilities such as accreditation areas, transport malls and vehicle screening areas.

On the future use of the Olympic stadium, Lady Ford revealed that she was aiming for a deal with a legacy tenant to be secured by the end of the year. But she said the OPLC had not yet entered into talks with West Ham about the premier league club moving in after the Games. She added: "West Ham have been very vocal about their interests but they are not the only show in town. We are in talks with other people."

Londoners will be denied first chance to buy tickets for the Olympics because of European law. A BBC documentary tonight reveals that EU law means there can be no preferential treatment for UK residents.