2012 London Olympics Bill ‘Five Times 2005 Estimate Of £2.37bn’

THE FINAL cost of the 2012 Olympics is expected to be five times the estimated figure when London won the bid in 2005, a Sky Sports investigation has found.

Their investigation has revealed that the final cost for hosting the Games will be over £12bn and associated costs could inflate the bill to as high as £24bn, which is over 10 times the original estimate.

In 2005 the estimated cost of hosting the Olympics and the Paralympics were £2.37bn, but the UK public sector funding package was increased to about £9.3bn in 2007, Sky.com reports.

According to the Sky investigation, an extra £2.4bn expenditure over £9.3bn would be incurred on extra expenses like deploying anti-doping control officers, spending on local councils for their Olympic torch relay programmes, cash spent on legacy schemes, governmental operational costs, the cost of the Olympic Park Legacy Company and legal bills over the stadium tenancy decision, extra pounds to UK Sport and the cost of buying the land for the venues at £766m.

But it excludes the extra counter-terrorism funding of £1.131bn, £4.4bn budgets of the security and intelligence services, the opportunity cost of having the majority of the UK police force policing the Games instead of being deployed elsewhere and £6.5bn on transport upgrades.

Had all the above factors been included the total bill would have shot up to £24bn, the report said.

Though the investigation has tried to include as many extra Games expenses as possible but there is certainly more spending that has not been accounted for, it added.

 

http://news.sky.com/home/london-olympics/article/16156780