Comment: Olympic legacy - where is the plan?

The sheer scale of this legacy is enormous, nothing less than the regeneration of the Lea Valley, an opportunity to turn a marginalised part of the South-East into a remarkable place to live and work. With the right transport links to Canary Wharf, including the waterways, it promises real economic benefits for the entire region. Yet a few weeks ago, the Mayor, Boris Johnson, told this paper that there was no masterplan for that legacy, "no sign" that senior figures had seriously considered the options. To which Sebastian Coe, head of the 2012 organising committee, responded that this was the responsibility of government and the Mayor's office. The idea that the legacy could end up as a matter for buck-passing is, frankly, alarming. With only four years to go, an expansive, thought-through plan should already be in place.

As Mr Higgins makes clear, the stadium will be built on time; it is the funding for the £1 billion Olympics village which is more problematic, even if it appropriates the Games's contingency funds. The prospects of substantial private-sector funding have been undermined by the housing market. It had been hoped that the village would bequeath 4,500 homes; that has been scaled down to 3,300.

But the challenge of the legacy is for the entire site, not only the village and the stadium, and for that, as Mr Johnson has said, we need "a complete overview of what on earth we're trying to achieve on the Olympics site and what in the long term this is all about". He has talked about providing a potential university site, about a hub for sunrise industries or an enormous market, about a Hyde Park of the east. Yet with four years to go, we need to have a coherent masterplan for housing, transport and the social infrastructure of the area, not just visionary aspirations.

This is, of course, the responsibility of government as well as the Mayor - yet Tessa Jowell, the minister concerned, has been short on detail when it comes to the physical legacy of 2012. The Beijing Olympics will whet the appetite for the London Games but the issue of what happens not just to the 2012 site but to the whole area afterwards needs to be addressed - with real will and urgency.