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How to kickstart Games legacy, by Blair's ex-aide
Matthew Taylor4 Mar 2009
As the father of two football-mad teenage boys and a keen runner I am a bit obsessed with participation in sport. So I was delighted when London won the 2012 bid with the promise this would be an inclusive Olympics.
It was with growing dismay that I watched the failure to deliver. There is no evidence from anywhere in the world that elite sporting events lead to higher grassroots participation. Since 2005, when we won the bid, there has been no rise in central London and the Olympic boroughs.
The Government has invested in school sport but, as the Standard has powerfully exposed, many parts of the capital lag behind.
So, the Royal Society of Arts and its London Fellows developed our own idea. We suggested creating an independent campaign. The body would act as a focal point and online portal for existing initiatives, and agitate to get those who have sporting resources to make these more easily available to Londoners. The body might also develop a small number of high-profile schemes, for example, scaling up initiatives like McDonalds' football coaching into a London-wide aim of 50,000 extra people getting basic coaching qualifications. Or how about a sporting "time bank", where people who give time to support participation get benefits like cut-price tickets to Premiership matches? Or even a 10km run in every London borough starting at the same time as the 2012 marathon?
The RSA doesn't have any track record in sport and we don't want to run the new organisation ourselves, but we were overwhelmed by the response. Existing participation schemes saw it as a great way of getting their message across. Major corporates contacted us saying they wanted to get into the spirit of 2012 but avoid bureaucracy. Independent schools, gyms, business groups wanted to get on board. The initiative would have needed an initial public grant, but could be self-financing in short order.
But I fear Let The Games Begin (our name for the organisation) looks unlikely. We can't persuade the Mayor's office to back the idea. The stumbling block is predictable: they don't like the idea of an independent campaign. Whitehall officials have been supportive, but say it is up to the Mayor, who has asked MP Kate Hoey to write his sport plan.
As a Londoner I care less about the Olympics than the image of this city. Successful Olympic hosts tell a great story about themselves (think Sydney, Barcelona) but what is the London story? The inspiration for Let The Games Begin was that this would be the people of London delivering on the pledge London made; we could be the first Olympic city to make mass participation real.
Government and City Hall have to be generous and brave, taking the risk of supporting a feisty, independent, grassroots campaign, not just yet another state aspiration.
●Matthew Taylor is chief executive of the Royal Society of Arts and a former head of policy at No10.
