Olympic body appoints rail man
09/05/2007 |
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John Armitt, the chief executive of Network Rail, will today be confirmed as the new chairman of the Olympic Delivery Authority, the body responsible for building the London 2012 infrastructure.
Armitt, 60, will be the full-time replacement for the American Jack Lemley, who resigned suddenly last October, but his appointment represents a significant snub to Sir Roy McNulty, the acting chairman who was on the shortlist to succeed Lemley.
McNulty had been seen as a safe pair of hands to succeed Lemley, but recent comments suggesting that the Olympic budget had not been thought through did not help his case for the permanent post.
Armitt, meanwhile, is considered to be more adept in the public eye and his experience at Network Rail, the company responsible for managing Britain's 10,000 miles of track and 2,500 stations, has given him ample experience of negotiating between government and the private sector.
John Ritblat, the former chief executive of British Land and a member of the Conservative Party's Olympic scrutiny group, is understood to have been sounded out for the job but turned it down.
Like Lemley, Armitt was involved in the construction of the Channel Tunnel, and his task now is to oversee the most high-profile project of its sort ever undertaken in the UK. Armitt trained as a civil engineer and worked on building sites for the construction firm John Laing, rising rapidly through the ranks to become an international project manager aged 31.
He oversaw the construction of the Sizewell B nuclear power plant and in 1993 joined Union Railways, the British Rail subsidiary responsible for building the Channel Tunnel rail link, by happy coincidence the line that will transport the bulk of Olympic tourists from Kings Cross in central London to Stratford in 2012.
He was later chief executive of construction firm Costain before being appointed chief executive of Railtrack in 2001, shortly before the government put it into administration.
Armitt's task will be to act as a convincing front-man for an organisation that will endure unprecedented scrutiny in the next five years as work on the Olympic Park gets underway.
ODA chief executive David Higgins is regarded as a master of the detail and complexity of the project, but Armitt will be expected to act as the organisation's advocate in the inevitable periods of criticism that lie ahead.
One of his first tasks will be to establish which government department will ultimately take charge of the Olympic project. Speculation is rife in Westminster circles that the Department for Culture Media and Sport will lose the brief following Gordon Brown's arrival at No10, with the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister and the Cabinet Office touted as possible homes for the project.
(Source: Guardian.co.uk)
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