ODA boss: 2012 venues will be finished early and under budget 16/07/2010 |
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Olympic Delivery Authority (ODA) chief executive David Higgins has vowed to have the venues for London 2012 finished early and with £850m to spare.
With just over two years until the Olympic flame is lit on July 27, 2012, the main stadium is almost finished, with 6,400 of the 80,000 seats installed.
The other venues are not far behind and Higgins told The Guardian that the main arenas would be ready for handover well before the target of next summer.
The athletes' village is also on course to be finished well ahead of the target of January 2012.
Higgins said: "You can see a skyline and a landscape that works. The unsung hero of the venues is the velodrome, which is efficient and startling.
"We're not complacent. This is the most complex part with all the contractors doing fit-out, and it's when the accidents can happen.
"The main figure I focus on is the anticipated final cost of £7.26bn. You won't see a big change in that figure.
"Since the date we set out our baseline report in December 2006, when it was £7.15bn, it has changed by 2 per cent over 3½ years.
"In the middle of that we had the credit crunch, the fall-over of financing on the village and the media centre and everything else.
"If we can deliver that for the government, that will be a fantastic result. That will be £850m under the original target of £8.1bn."
The £8.1bn is the ODA's portion of the overall £9.35bn budget, with most of the rest earmarked for security. The organising committee's separate budget of £2bn is raised privately.
Higgins – whose pay totalled £537,000 last year, even after deferring half of his £209,566 annual bonus until 2012 – recently topped a Cabinet Office list of the highest earners from the public purse.
But he added: "We're not civil servants with public service pensions or retirement benefits or redundancy packages. It's all based on performance.
"The way I want people to judge myself, my team and our contractors is on our performance."
He said he and all senior executives, 15 of whom earn more than the prime minister, had opted to freeze their pay for a second year running, adding that several had also chosen to defer part of their performance-related bonuses until the completion of the project.
His own bonus was a matter for the government, Higgins said. "That's still on ministers' desks – it's not going to be a top priority," he continued. "They will review it. They haven't made any decisions at all yet."
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